Abstract:
Turkey was ranked 8th globally last year in the production of steel. Steel and other metal production and processing are essential for the country’s economy, technology and employment levels. Efficient, advanced manufacturing and high value-added products and services are needed to support the growth of this sector and along with it automotive and aerospace sectors. More recently, the trend towards sustainable manufacturing has created new challenges in materials processing and specifically in metal forming. This project focuses on forming of metal sheets, and aims to better understand the mechanics of craft (traditional) forming processes, with clear technological, economic and sustainability implications.
Forming processes are part-specific and require casting and machining of dedicated dies, leading to additional emissions and energy costs, and in case of low-volume production, high tooling costs. A solution that can significantly reduce tooling and energy costs and emissions, are flexible forming processes. Flexible forming processes are processes that allow for a wide range of geometries to be produced with a set of simple, generic tools, as opposed to using complex tools (dies) specific to a single part geometry.
This project aims to develop a prototype for a flexible, zero-waste and sustainable metal forming process with applications in the automotive, aerospace, and other sectors.