CAREER: Integrated Materials-Mechanics-Manufacturing Approach to Hot Blank - Cold Die (HB-CD) Forming of Lightweight Alloy Sheets

这项学院早期职业发展(Career)奖助金提供资金，用于推进一种新的板材成形工艺，称为“热毛坯-冷模”，该工艺特别适合于用镁和铝合金等轻质材料制造部件。将开发一种热力耦合数值工具来模拟这一过程并捕捉材料的非等温变形。数值工具将结合考虑各向异性和微观结构变化的分析材料模型。单轴和双向拉伸试验将在广泛的条件下(温度和应变率)进行，以充分描述材料的特性并校准材料模型。数值工具的整体验证将通过将预测与不同工艺条件下的实验热毛坯-冷模成形运行进行比较来执行。后者将逐步进行，从小规模的实验室实验开始，到汽车零部件的全尺寸成型。将对成形零件中的材料性能进行评估，并构建后处理图，为未来的工艺优化工作铺平道路。如果成功，所提出的工艺将有可能以比目前热成形操作实现的更低的成本和更高的生产能力制造这些难以成形的合金。研究成果可以为这些有限用途材料，特别是汽车轻量化的产品设计提供依据。该项目包括教育和外展部分，将在一个仅面向研究生的机构培养本科生研究活动，将教育和研究整合到最近建立的汽车工程项目中，并将丰富南卡罗来纳州北部地区唯一的儿童博物馆的教育和外展活动。该项目还将有助于开发一个教育电视节目，旨在提高人们对重大长期问题(节能、可持续发展等)的认识，并激励年轻一代了解工程和创新如何帮助解决这些问题。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant provides funding for advancing a new sheet metal forming process, referred to as "hot blank-cold die," which is particularly suited for manufacturing components out of lightweight materials, such as magnesium and aluminium alloys. A coupled thermo-mechanical numerical tool will be developed to simulate the process and capture the non-isothermal material deformation. The numerical tool will incorporate analytical material models that take both anisotropy and changes in the microstructure into account. Uniaxial and biaxial tensile tests will be carried out over a wide range of conditions (temperatures and strain rates), in order to fully characterize material behaviour and calibrate the material models. Overall validation of the numerical tool will be performed by comparing predictions to experimental hot blank-cold die forming runs under various process conditions. The latter will be performed progressively, starting from small-scale lab experiments, to full-scale forming runs of automotive components. Material properties in the formed parts will be evaluated and post-process maps will be constructed, paving the way for future process optimization work.If successful, the proposed process has the potential to enable the manufacture of these hard-to-form alloys at lower cost and higher throughput than is currently achieved with hot forming operations. The research outcomes could enable product design for these limited-use materials, especially for light weighting of automobiles. The project has educational and outreach components that will foster undergraduate research activities in a graduate-only institution, integrate education and research within a recently-established automotive engineering program, and will enrich educational and outreach activities at the only Children's Museum in the upstate region of South Carolina. The project will also contribute to developing an Educational Television Program that aims at promoting awareness of grand long-term issues (energy conservation, sustainability, etc.), and inspiring the younger generations on how engineering and innovation help tackle such issues.