Experiment description

Flow-forming is a manufacturing process in which the final shape of the piece is achieved by gradually reducing the thickness through a metal flow-forming technique. The calibration of the process parameters is very expensive and difficult to achieve without using numerical optimisation techniques.

Through this experiment, we plan to make business in the marketplace by using the computing power of the Cloud-HPC to offer a hefty solution to the end-users of this technology.

The ultimate aim is to offer advanced-metal-forming simulation services to European SMEs and worldwide Flow Forming (FF) manufacturers, by improving their manufacturing techniques with a better knowledge of the material behaviour.

Technical impact

The Flow-Forming (FF) technique: is an advanced cold-forming incremental deformation by rotation process for the manufacturing of hollow components. FF allows the production of dimensionally precise and rotationally symmetrical components and is typically performed by compressing the outside diameter of a cylindrical preform over an inner rotating mandrel using a combination of axial and radial forces from several rollers.

The simulation of the FF process in the HPC infrastructure with optimization loops, will allow to analyse variations on the process parameters with the aim to maximize the production results and, at the same time, to avoid manufacturing defects that may appear when the process has not been calibrated conveniently .

Economic Impact

The project results will allow to increase the use of the flow -forming technology would help to increase the global market . The market share of DENN would increase more than double the present turnover beyond 25 M€/ year in five years.

The Cloud-HPC simulation suite for use of customer metal forming manufacturing process development will give DENN a competitive advantage further than the current worldwide competitors.

The Flowcalop simulation suite will be offered to the customers as an accessory with DENN machines, and it will be also commercialized to other flow-forming manufacturers.

The turnover increase estimated will be between 10 to 35% per year. There will be new business opportunities, due to access to new market requiring advanced simulation techniques and with increasing demand of calculation power.

Experiment Outcome

The cloud optimisation allows faster analysis of the process parameters in order to maximize the production and to avoid manufacturing defects (that may appear when not properly calibrated). Thanks to Cloud Computing engineering time will be reduced by 60 % and the mechanical properties of the final parts will be improved by avoiding breakages in service due to excessive consumption of the fracture energy during the forming process. This will not only drastically reduce the hours of unproductive trial and error testing, but also reduce expenditure on testing material, as well as on the production process itself. This will also involve a reduction of the environmental impact of the tests, associated to the lower consumption of lubricants as a result of the optimization of the manufacturing process. Further the estimated turnover is expected to increase by 10 % to 35 % per year and new business opportunities will arise by increasing engineering projects with customers in initial design phases. Since QUANTECH and DENN will jointly exploit the FLOWCALOP software, DENN’s customers will become customers of QUANTECH as well. Additionally, the ISV will benefit from the high-quality innovation of the numerical simulation suite to be offered to a wider market of niche advanced manufacturing processes. Thanks to Cloud Computing QUANTECH and DENN could both reduce calculation time dramatically by about 50 – 80 %. Due to the use of cloud computing a significant reduction of costs for computing infrastructure (50%) and machine manufacturing (about 20% at DENN) could also be achieved. In the aftermath this will also reduce commercialization time for DENN will also be reduced by about 30% to 50%.