I’m now writing the monthly Science of Forming article for Metalforming Magazine – it’s a great honor to be taking over from Dr. Stuart Keeler. See my first article, The More You Know, on page 36 at http://metalformingmagazine.com/magazine/digital-issue/?/2017/Dec Optimizing sheetmetal flow to form a stamped part requires understanding the interaction between the sheetmetal, surface characteristics and tooling. Consider where we were in the 1970s. Back then, we could choose between seven grades [...]

Introduction / Summary The type and depth of knowledge required to form sheet metal changed along with the industry. Experience is no longer the only measure of an employee’s capabilities. During the past 25 years, thousands of new grades of steel were introduced, aluminum components became more common, forming technologies evolved, and computer analysis began to supplement traditional processes. Gone are the days of only forming a handful of [...]

Tim Worstall, a contributor to Forbes magazine, recently wrote an opinion piece, “It’s Not China Or Trade That Killed The Steel Jobs But Recycling.“ The crux of the piece was that the job losses in the steel industry over the past half-century can be attributed to the rise of more efficient minimills capturing business that was once held by integrated mills. I think this is an oversimplification of the [...]

One of the challenges with direct hot forming a galvanized PHS is the risk of microcracks in the coating and an associated restricted process window. Steel company voestalpine has with their phs-ultraform® product developed a process that they have termed phs-directform®.  The process steps are similar to conventional direct hot forming with one significant difference – the use of a non-contact “pre-cooler” which cools the heated blanks to around [...]