Damage-Controlled Forming Processes
Starting from January 1st, 2017, the German Research Foundation (DFG) will provide funding for the Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR188 „damage-controlled forming processes“. This was announced by middle of November 2016 after the meeting of DFG´s review board. The SFB project, which is carried out between RWTH Aachen University and TU Dortmund, will receive a financial support of 8 Million € for the next years. The speaker of the centre is Prof. A. Erman Tekkaya from TU Dortmund´s Institute of Forming Technology and Lightweight Construction. Head of the group in Aachen is Prof. Gerhard Hirt from RWTH Aachen´s Metal Forming Institute. Further partners are the university of Cottbus and the Max-Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf.
Damage isn´t failure – this understanding ist he simple message behind our project. We will identify and characterize damage mechanisms during forming operations in order to study the effects of damage on product properties. We aim to provide the experimental and numerical methods to control damage during forming processes, aiming to establish the means to design forming process chains based on the feature „usability“ instead of „formability“. The project will allow us to adapt the process parameters to control damage phenomena and to adjust product properties.
At RWTH Aachen University, the project team is made up by the Steel Institute IEHK (Integrity of Materials and Structures, the Metal Forming Institute IBF, the Central Facility for Electron Microscopy GFE and the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering WZL (Manufacturing Technology).