New Impulses in the Forming of Magnesium Sheet Metals

Abstract

Owing to growing demands by customers for comfort and safety in cars, the weight of the respective individual automobile increases constantly. Hence, the role of construction materials, such as aluminium and magnesium alloys in car body production becomes ever more important. Especially magnesium is highly attractive because of its small density, its positive mechanic-technological properties, and the ready availability as raw material. It is known that magnesium has a reduced formability at room temperature and needs to be heated up to temperatures at around 300°C to be deformable with technologically useful forming rates. So therefore to form sheets made of magnesium alloys, the workpiece has to be heated previously. The idea of combining the processes "inductive heating" and "pulsed magnetic forming" led to the following research work. The aim was to develop a tool that combines both processes to be able to heat up the forming zone at the workpiece to a significant temperature and to form it afterwards without changing the tool. However, in order to manufacture sheet metal components from magnesium innovative manufacturing technologies are necessary. The Institute for Machine Tools and Factory Management (IWF) carries out research and develops solutions in the field of pulsed magnetic forming.