Advanced Tooling Manufacturing for Composite Structures (ATMCS)

Sheet metal products have made an indispensable place for themselves in our day to day lives. Light weight, good surface finish, low finished product cost, and relatively good formability are just few of the many features that make the sheet metal products so attractive. This includes all the product lines such as automotive, aerospace, appliance, construction, instruments, heating and ventilation. Foreign manufacturers are rapidly becoming more competitive and posing a threat to the existence of the U.S. sheet metal fabrication industries. In this new environment, the U.S. must deploy new strategic manufacturing initiative to win this world-wide competition. A major contributing factor for losing the battle lies in the existing U.S. manufacturing infrastructure that fosters unacceptable product prototyping and production cycle time, uncontrolled process variability, unnecessary rework, and too many quality inspections. The challenge of this program is to resolve the problem of cost, quality, production cycle time, and time for prototyping. Tool design and tool fabrication are the crucial steps in manufacturing of sheet metal parts (sheet/extrusion products). During the process of metal forming, the blank conforms itself to the configuration of the tool. Therefore, a tool will produce an unacceptable part. At present, the remedy for this problem is the check/straightening or handworking of the part following the forming operation. This manual rework sometimes account for 40% of the total touch labor hour in aerospace industries. In addition, handworking inevitably leads to the variability of the product which results in additional cost during sub-assembly or final assembly of the product. Majority of the metal fabricators still use the trial-and-error approach to produce tools. It is not uncommon to rework a tool, for a complex forming operation like stretch forming, five times. The proposed work extend the benefit of the ATMCS to the sheet metal fabrication process with the following benefits: a) producing accurate tooling which eliminates trial and error in tool fabrication. b) producing the parts with minimum cost by elimination of handworking. c) pr