Production and heat treatment of composite components by temperature-assisted incremental tube forming

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. A. Erman Tekkaya
• Subject Area: Primary Shaping and Reshaping Technology, Additive Manufacturing
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 527631798

In an effort to reduce CO2 emissions and resources, more and more manufacturing companies are following the philosophy of lightweight design. Various strategies can be pursued, such as the use of components with high specific strength, load-adapted structures or functional integration. This poses particular challenges for the flexibility of the forming processes, for example to enable a local variation of the material and the adjustment of varying local material properties. Based on this, various methods arise to meet the requirements for components. These include so-called tailoring, the use of high-strength materials, thermally assisted processes and the use of composite components. Composite components make it possible to combine specific material properties in a targeted manner. The aim of this project is the production, grading and incremental forming of composite tubes in a single process step. The aim is to produce composites with oxidation-inhibiting outer tubes and hardenable inner tubes. The planned implementation is based on temperature-assisted incremental tube forming and subsequent tempering, in order to produce components with variable bending radii and cross-sections and properties adapted to requirements along the longitudinal axis. On the basis of the state of the art and the project-specific preliminary work, it will be investigated whether simultaneous composite production and forming generates synergies that lead to improved and more complex products. The process could be used to produce composite components with properties tailored to requirements in terms of mechanical loads and/or chemical resistance, which are either impossible to produce using other known processes or can only be produced at considerably greater expense. The resulting composite strength is to be described by analytical or semi-analytical models.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr.-Ing. Till Clausmeyer; Dr.-Ing. Heinrich Traphöner