Development of improved material composition and an improved manufacturing process

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form possess a varying degree of hardness. Certain batch of frames are too soft and requires additional heat treatment after production of the structural frame however they are susceptible to damage and improper forming during production process. In addition if hardness raw material increases the threshold, crack and improper forming of aluminum material causing high scrap rates. Currently to mitigate this issue, Rimowa production team has resorted into 100% testing of the frame hardness after bending and forming. This is resulting in extended delays in production process and additional costs incurred due to heat treatment and cleaning process that is required to produce a high quality hard frame with well-defined formed features. This situation has created a need to understand the composition of aluminum, investigate into the grain structure and design a new composition / raw material quenching process that would produce a stable extruded raw material with consistent and desirable hardness values. Furthermore once the desired material specification is developed, forming and bending process needs to be simulated in a finite element software to derive a much improved process such that higher hardness aluminum material can be formed without cracks or defects. Once a finite element model is completed, punch and die configuration and forming process parameters are varied and tested in lab settings to validate the finite element model.