Huge presses, clanking and thumping as they contort protesting metal into elegant shapes – this is the stuff many aspiring engineers dream of. Current undergraduate engineering education, however, avoids almost entirely the ways to design these presses. This is because of the difficulty of solving the equations of plasticity, and because undegraduate courses tend to restrict their attention to elastic stresses. Current CAE software, though, has made huge strides over the past few years. As a result, it is not unrealistic to expect an entry-level engineer to be able to build models to simulate sheet metal forming.

The availability of robust software and a rapidly growing knowledge-base of data on process-parameters makes it much easier for the engineer to come to terms with the relatively complex mechanics of stress. It also allows for cost-efficient simulation without resorting to wild over-simplifications.

Built around Altair’s HyperForm and Radioss, both of which are available to any engineer who has access to HyperMesh, this book addresses these aspects in easy-to-understand language supported with references for the interested engineer.

To make the most of this book you should be an engineering student, in your third or final year of Mechanical Engineering. You should have access to licenses of HyperWorks, to the Altair website, and to an instructor who can guide you through your chosen projects or assignments. The book can also be useful to working engineers faced with designing assemblies that allow relative motion between components. The solved examples presented as videos with voice-over narration can be downloaded – for free. The book is available both online and from Altair India. The PDF version is free: for printed versions, contact Altair India to check the price.

Areas covered include 

• design tasks associated with tool-rooms and tool-designers
• design-for-manufacture and CAE techniques such as optimization and robust design
• the different metal-working processes and terms like tailor-welded blanks
• the mechanics of metal forming, covering terms such as springback and hardening-coefficients for metals
• necessary terms and techniques in numerical analysis
• the relevance of the finite element method
• verification and data collection procedures such as circle-grid analysis and the forming limit diagram (FLD)
• incremental and inverse analyses
• techniques to model process aspects such as draw-beads and lubricants
• process-centric modelign using HyperForm
• solution control and extraction of results such as press-tonnage, thinning, wrinkling and tearing