Because of its rustproof property, stainless steel is widely used in kitchen appliances, building materials, electronics, chemical plants and automobile exhausts. In addition, the utilization of stainless steel for fuel cell application is growing. As the demand for this material increases, it is necessary to study the basic properties of stainless steel such as corrosion resistance, heat transfer, formability, cutting or shearing ability and weldability. In this article, the mechanical properties, formability and press forming performance of stainless steel are reviewed. Since temperature and strain rate affect the press forming performance of STS304(austenitic) stainless steel, the influence of these parameters on the plastic behavior should be investigated. Moreover, measures for the prevention of ridging of STS430(ferritic) and delayed fracture of STS430, which respectively appear during and after press forming, should be considered. Recently, stainless steel sheets with a thickness lower than 0.2 mm have been widely used in applications for mobile phone, digital camera and fuel cell separator. Therefore, there is a growing interest of studying the grain size effect and plasticity at the crystal scale in order to understand the anisotropic behavior and micro forming ability of thin sheets. This review paper was written with the objective of helping engineers and researchers to understand the forming characteristics of stainless steel and to establish standards in plastic forming techniques.

A flexible die, which is composed of a number of punches with adjusted heights to form a three-dimensional curved surface, is a crucial part of a flexible forming technology. In this study, the punch and control system of the flexible die were designed. The flexible die is divided into three modules, namely, punch, control and joint, and the corresponding modules were developed. The punch module materializes a three-dimensional forming surface by the control module, which is composed of an AC servo motor set and a linear guide. The joint module is necessary for the sequential motion between the servo motor set and the punch module. A sequential motion algorithm for the AC servo motor set, that uses the data of the punch relative heights, was also proposed. Finally, a flexible stretch forming test was carried out using the presently designed flexible die.

In recent years, automotive seat components have been manufactured by the fine blanking process, allowing an improvement of dimensional accuracy at sheared surface in series production. However, the rollover has increased and die failures have occurred more frequently when manufacturing gears by fine blanking. Consequently, important goals for manufacturing seat recliner parts with gears have been to decrease the rollover as well as to improve the tool life. In this study, the half blanking and shaving processes were introduced to improve aforementioned problems for the lower tooth, the main component of a seat recliner. For this purpose, the half blanking process was optimized using the finite element (FE) analysis and design of experiment (DOE). The optimized conditions resulting from this study were an offset of 0.2 mm, a clearance of 0.1 mm and a penetration depth of 4.5 mm. Fine blanking experiment conducted under the optimal condition resulted in a rollover depth decrease from 1.9 to 1.3 mm, and no die failure occurrence.

This paper is a review of biaxial tensile test equipments and specimens. The stresses acting on a component in service are multiaxial in nature. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the mechanical properties of sheet materials not only under uniaxial but also under these multiaxial stress states. Biaxial testing of metal in industry becomes an important investigation tool for the evaluation of mechanical properties of sheet metals. In this paper, several types of biaxial tensile tests were reviewed, and their advantages and limitations were discussed.

The formability of magnesium alloy sheets at room temperature is generally low because of the inherently limited number of slip systems, but higher at temperatures over $150^{\circ}C$. Therefore, prior to the practical application of these materials, the forming limits should be evaluated as a function of the temperature and strain rate. This can be achieved experimentally by performing a series of tests or analytically by deriving the corresponding modeling approaches. However, before the formability analysis can be conducted, a model of flow stress, which includes the effects of strain, strain rate and temperature, should be carefully identified. In this paper, such procedure is carried out for Mg alloy AZ31 and the concept of flow stress surface is proposed. Experimental flow stresses at four temperature levels ($150^{\circ}C$, $200^{\circ}C$, $250^{\circ}C$, $300^{\circ}C$) each with the pre-assigned strain rate levels of $0.01s^{-1}$, $0.1s^{-1}$ and $1.0s^{-1}$ are collected in order to establish the relationships between these variables. The temperature-compensated strain rate parameter which combines, in a single variable, the effects of temperature and strain rate, is introduced to capture these relationships in a compact manner. This study shows that the proposed concept of flow stress surface is practically relevant for the evaluation of temperature and strain dependent formability.

The two objectives of this study were, first, to determine the optimal friction welding process parameters using finite element simulations and, second, to evaluate the mechanical properties of the friction welded zone for large piston rods in marine diesel engines. Since the diameters of the rod and its connecting part are very different, the manufacturing costs using friction welding are reduced compared to those using the forging process of a single piece. Modeling is a generally accepted method to significantly reduce the number of experimental trials needed when determining the optimal parameters. Therefore, because friction welding depends on many process parameters such as axial force, initial rotational speed and energy, amount of upset and working time, finite element simulations were performed. Then, friction welding experiments were carried out with the optimal process parameter conditions resulting from the simulations. The base material used in this investigation was AISI 4140 with a rod outer diameter of 280 mm and an inner diameter of 160 mm. In this study, various investigation methods, including microstructure characterization, hardness measurements and tensile and fatigue testing, were conducted in order to evaluate the mechanical properties of the friction welded zone.

In this study, an approach designed to compute high temperature friction coefficients for SCM 435 steel through a pilot hot rolling test and a finite element analysis, is proposed. Single pass pilot hot flat rolling tests with reduction ratios varying from 20 to 40% were carried out at temperatures ranging from 900 to $1200^{\circ}C$. In the proposed approach, the friction coefficient is calculated by comparing the measured strip spread and the roll force with the simulation results. This study showed that the temperature and reduction ratio had a significant influence on the friction coefficient. As both material temperature and reduction ratio become higher, the friction coefficient increases monotonically. This finding is not in agreement with the Ekelund model, which is widely used in the analysis of the hot rolling process. In the present work, the friction coefficient at a reduction ratio of 40% was found to be 1.2 times greater than that at a reduction of 30%. This higher friction coefficient means that an increment of the roll thrust force is expected at the next stand. Therefore, a roll pass designer must understand this phenomenon in order to adjust the reduction ratio at the stands while keeping the driving power, the roll housing structure and the work roll strength within the allowable range.

Vacuum-assisted thermoforming is one of the critical steps for the successful application of film insert molding(FIM) to parts of complex shapes. If the thickness distribution of the formed film is non-uniform, cracking, deformation, warping, and wrinkling can easily occur at the injection molding stage. In this study, the effects of processing parameters, which include the film heating time, plug depth, plug speed and vacuum delay time, on film thickness distribution were investigated. It was found that the film thickness at the part sidewall decreases with increasing the film heating time and plug depth, but the thickness at the bottom was found to exhibit the opposite behavior. The film thickness of the sidewall was observed to increase at higher plug speed and vacuum delay time of 0 ~ 0.3sec.

Multilayer(clad) sheets, composed of two or more materials with different properties, are fabricated using the roll-bonding process. A good formability is an essential property for a multilayered sheet in order to manufacture parts by plastic deformation. In this study, the influences of temperature and strain rate on the plastic properties of stainless steel-aluminum-magnesium multilayered(STS-Al-Mg) sheets were investigated. Tensile tests were performed at various temperatures and strain rates on the multilayered sheet and on each separate layer. Fracture of the multilayered sheet was observed to be temperature-dependent. At the base temperature of $200^{\circ}C$, all materials fractured simultaneously. At lower temperatures, the Mg alloy sheet fractured earlier than the other materials. Conversely, the other materials fractured earlier than the Mg alloy sheet at higher temperatures. The uniform and total elongations of the multilayered sheet were observed to be higher than that of each material at a temperature of $250^{\circ}C$. Larger uniform elongations were obtained for higher strain rates at constant temperature. The same trend was observed for the Mg alloy sheet, which exhibited the lowest elongation among the three materials. The tensile strengths and elongations of the single layer sheets were compared to those of the multilayer material. The strength of the multilayered sheet was successfully calculated by the rule of mixture from the values of each single layer. However, no simple correlation between the elongation of each layer and that of the multilayer was obtained.