• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.87-92
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• 2018

Auto industries have tried to employ lightweight alloys to improve the fuel efficiency of manufactured vehicles, as the environmental concern becomes an important issue. Even though the aluminum alloy is one of the most appropriate lightweight alloys for auto parts, the low formability of an aluminum alloy has been an obstacle to its application. In order to resolve the low formability problem, a recent study (Lee et al., 2017 [1]) showed that the infrared (IR) local heat treatment can improve the formability with a reduction of heating energy. However, the aforementioned study was limited to only a linear line heating. Since many of the available auto parts as applicable to vehicle manufacturing have a curved line shape, the heating experiments for a curved line should be studied. The possibility of building IR lamps having complex shapes is an advantage of the IR lamp, since it can control the heating shape. This work conducted the IR local heat treatment for the curved line. The experimental results show that the IR local heat treatment can improve the formability of the aluminum alloy for curved line. Additionally, it is shown that the IR local heat treatment also reduces the heating energy when it is compared with the furnace heating which heats a blank as a whole. A numerical simulation with a stress-based forming limit diagram also supports the experimental results.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.1542-1547
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• 2007

Laser surface treatment technologies have been used to improve characteristics of wear and to enhance the fatigue resistance for mold parts. The optical lens with the elliptical profile is designed to obtain a wide surface hardening area with a uniform hardness. The objective of this research work is to investigate the influence of the process parameters, such as power of laser and defocused spot position, on the characteristics of laser surface treatment for the case of SKD61 steel and SCM4 steel. From the results of the experiments, it has been shown that the maximum average hardness is approximatly 700${\sim}$780 Hv when the power, focal position and the travel of laser are 1,095 W, 0mm and 0.3 m/min, respectively. In samples treated with lower scanning speeds, some small carbide particles appear in the interdendritic regions. This region contains fine martensite and carbide in proportions which depend on the local thermal cycle.