The new FLD of the laser welded blank, which includes FLCs of welded zone and base metals, is introduced. For the forming limits of welded zone, the hemispherical dome punch tests were performed with various widths of asymmetric specimen. The FLC0 as well as the dome height at fracture associated with various specimen widths in the same and different thickness combinations were found to see the formability depending on thickness combinations. In order to show the application of the new FLD, the measured strains of squared cup drawing and simulated strains of door inner panel stamping were compared with those of FLCs. The successful prediction of fracture in the applications reveals that the forming limits of welded zone and base metals should be separately found for more accurate evaluation of the formability and workability of the laser welded blank.

This research investigates microstructures and fatigue properties of the weldments of 6005A aluminum alloy developed for railroad vehicles. The samples were extruded into a truss structure and welded together using the gas metal arc welding process. The extruded sample showed a wide variation in grain size, possibly due to the frictional heating as well as the inghomogeneous metal flow in the extrusion die. The mechanical properties of the samples were affected by the mirocstructures. The fatigue strength of the welded structure was found to decrease significantly from that of the base metal. It was found that the fatigue characteristics of the welded structure were determined by the microstructure of the parent metal as well as weld defects such as porosities and the liquation cracks.

A series of parametric study was performed for the investigation on the influence of analysis parameters to the solution behavior in the elastic-plastic-static analysis of several sheet metal forming processes, such as deflection by a point force under plane strain and axisymmetric conditions, plane strain bending by a punch, axisymmetric stretching by a punch, axisymmetric bulging by hydraulic pressure, and axisymmetric deep drawing by a punch. The parameters considered are kind of element, number of elements, integration scheme for elemental equation and friction coefficient. Results obtained for different selections of those parameters were compared with each other, experimental measurements and analytical solution.

Sheet metal formabilities for aluminum 1050 and 5052 were experimentally investigated in this study. Deep drawability, bendability and stretch formability were measured at each process condition and correlated with tensile properties of sheet metal. To compare the formabilities of aluminum 1050 and 5052 sheets with those of steel sheets, deep drawing quality(DDQ) steel sheets are also tested at the same test conditions. Through the experimental studies, influential process variables for each forming process were obtained and correlated with the tensile properties. The comparisons of sheet metal formabilities with those of steed sheets showed that aluminum 1050 and 5052 is inherently deficient in formability than steel sheets but Al 5052 that has highter n and r value than al 1050 showed better formabilities.

In this paper, we developed the hydroforming simulator which can apply an axial compressive force and high internal pressure to bulge a tube. Experimental dtudies have been performed to investigate the effect of each parameters such as internal pressure and axial compression stroke required for the forming of circular components. Under the improper forming conditions there were two forming failures. One was the axial buckling due to excessive axial compressive load and the other was the circumferential necking fracture due to relatively high internal pressure. A safe forming zone without any failures exists between these two extreme zones. Also the condition of forming failure such as fracture is examined throughout the theoretical analysis. This paper covers a brief overview of the mechanism of hydroforming process as well as the design of die and tools.

The die wear is one of the main factors affecting product accuracy and die life in hot forging process. It is desired to analyze die wear by developing wear prediction method combined with FE-simulatin and experiment. Lots of researches have been done into the wear analysis of cold forging die, and the results of those researches were successful, but there have been little applications to hot forging die giving successful results. That is because hot forging process has many factors influencing die wear, and there was not accurate in-process data. In this research, change of die surface hardness by thermal softening during the lifetime was obtained by experiment, and hardness distribution of cross section was measured. This wear analysis was applied to hot forging die, and gave comparatively good results compared with actual wear profile.

Hot precision forging with a back pressure was investigated for manufacturing of compressor parts made of Al-Si alloy. Disk-shaped blank made of Al-Si alloy was hot forged, and ribs were formed by loading back pressure on their top. The influence of the back pressure and die temperature on forgeability and properties of parts made of Al-Si alloy were examined. Using the F.E.M. simulation, we found the optimum vallue of back-pressure. The prototypes of scroll parts were forged into the near-net shape and satisfied the required properties.

Most studies of failure analysis in ductile metals have been based on the classical plasticity theory using the local constitutive relations. These frequently yields a physically unrealistic solution, in which a numerical prediction of the onset of a deformation localization shows an inherent mesh-size sensitivity. A one way to remedy the spurious mesh sensitivity resulted in the unreasonable results is to incorporate the non-local plasticity into the simulation model, which introduce an internal (material) length-scale parameter into the classical constitutive relations. In this paper, a non-local version of the modified Gurson constitutive relation has been introduced into the finite element formulation of the simulation for plane strain compression of the visco elastic-plastic void material. By introducing the non-local constitutive relations we could successfully removed the inherent mesh-size sensitivity for the prediction of the deformation localization. The effects of non-local constitutive relation are discussed in terms of the load-stroke curve and the strain distributions accross the shear band.

The present study tackles the metallurgical subjects involving the thin slab-direct hot rolling process, i.e. mini-mill process. In order to clarify the effect of chemical composition of steel and MnS precipitation behaviors on the development of edge cracking during hot rolling, the content of manganese and sulfur in low carbon steel was varied and the isothermal treatment prior to roughing was applied. Edge cracking during roughing in the hot-rolling process of mini-mill was effectively prevented by means of the isothermal treatment at 115$0^{\circ}C$ for 5 minutes in the 0.4% manganese steel containing sulfur lower than 0.013%. With the increase in manganese content in low carbon steel, coarser MnS developed. The edge cracking index which denotes the total length of edge crack per unit edge-length of rolled specimens was proposed in this paper. It was found that the edge cracking index linearly decreased with the increase in the ratio of MnS.

Dynamic recrystallization (DRX), which may occur during hot deformation, is important for the microsturctural evolution of 304 stainless steel. Especially, the current interest in modelling hot rolling demands quantitative relationships among the thermomechanical process variables, such as strain, temperature, strain rate, and etc. Thus, this paper individually presents the relationships for flow stress and volume fraction of DRX as a function of processing variables using torsion tests. The hot torsion tests of 304 stainless steel were performed at the temperature range of 900~110$0^{\circ}C$ and the strain rate range of 5x10-2~5s-1 to study the high temperature softening behavior. For the exact prediction of flow stress, the equation was divided into two regions, the work hardening (WH) and dynamic recovery (DRV) region and the DRX region. Especially, The flow stress of DRX region could be expressed by using the volume fraction of DRX (XDRX). Since XDRX was consisted of the critical strain($\varepsilon$c) for initiation of dynamic recrystallization (DRX) and the strain for maximum softening rate ($\varepsilon$*), that were related with the evolution of microstructure. The calculated results predicted the flow stress and the microstructure of the alloy at any deformation conditions well.

The static softening behavior of SCM 440 could be characterized by the hot torsion test in the temperature ranges of 90$0^{\circ}C$~110$0^{\circ}C$and strain rate ranges of 0.05/sec~5/sec. Interrupted deformation was performed with 2 pass deformation in the pass strain ranges of 0.25$\varepsilon$p~3$\varepsilon$p and interrupted time ranges of 0.5~100sec. The dependences of process variables, pass strain ($\varepsilon$i), stain rate ($\varepsilon$), temperature (T) and interpass time (ti), on static recrystallization (SRX) and metadynamic recrystallization (MDRX)were individually predicted from the modified Avrami's equations, The dependence of pass strain on MDRX was neglectable. Comparison of the softening kinetics between MDRX and SRX showed that the rate of MDRX was more rapid than that of SRX for the same deformation variables. Controlled multipass deformations were performed using static and metadynamic recrystallization of SCM 440.