Casting and metal forming

Abstract

Modern-day demands for conserving resources and saving energy, for example in automobile manufacture, are increasingly leading to lightweight and composite designs. The latter involve vehicle bodies made of combined materials: steel materials with different strengths, aluminium alloys and, in future, sheets made of stainless steel, titanium, and magnesium. Innovative, “semi-finished” products are also used. These offer advantages in the production process chain, which they can help to simplify, or serve to manufacture components that have multifunctional properties and meet additional requirements such as the ability to damp noise. The challenges involved can only be addressed successfully if the entire product creation process is examined in detail. The production processes available at present and those set to be introduced in the future can be divided into six main categories according to two criteria: those that change material cohesion and those that change material properties.