Browsing by Author "Romeiro, F."
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- Additive manufacturing tooling for the automotive industryPublication . Leal, Rui; Barreiros, F. M.; Alves, L.; Romeiro, F.; Vasco, J. C.; Santos, M.; Marto, C.Automotive industry faces new challenges every day, new design trends and technological deployments from research push companies to develop new models and facelifts in short term, requiring new tools or tool reshaping. Concerning the current world economic scenario, decreasing time for tooling up becomes as important as decreasing time-to-market. Such scenario opens up the horizons for new manufacturing approaches like additive manufacturing, in this case, applied for tooling up a stamping process on the automotive industry for the production of body panels. This approach enables the manufacturing of stamping inserts using similar high performance alloy steel as in conventional tooling, therefore, without losing tool mechanical properties. The stamping tools produced were tested by an automotive company in order to determine tool behaviour under real operating conditions, considering the high level demands of the stamping process. The results obtained enabled to conclude that metal additive manufacturing provided tools for the stamping process with excellent performance with a significant decrease on time-to-tooling.
- DMLS technology for automotive toolingPublication . Leal, R.; Barreiros, Fatima; Alves, M.L.; Romeiro, F.; Vasco, J.; Santos, M.; Marto, C.The automotive industry is challenged every day, with companies competing and developing new models and facelifts in short term, requiring new tools or tool reshaping. Concerning the current world economic scenario, decreasing time-for-tooling becomes as important as decreasing time-to-market. Such scenario opens up the horizons for new manufacturing approaches like additive manufacturing. In this case-study, additive manufacturing is applied for tooling up a stamping process for the production of body panels for the automotive industry. This approach enables the manufacturing of stamping tool inserts with similar high performance alloy steel as in conventional tooling, although, without any loss of tool properties and saving a significant part of the tool manufacturing time. The evaluation of the tool performance and tool life estimation was carried out based on three point bending fatigue tests using specimens manufactured by the same additive process and using the same powder material. From these data, it was possible to establish realistic scenarios for the use of additive tooling and to evaluate its feasibility on the automotive industry.
- Fatigue crack growth with overloads/underloads: Interaction effects and surface roughnessPublication . Romeiro, F.; Freitas, M. de; Fonte, M. daThe generalization of damage tolerance to variable amplitude fatigue is of prime importance in order to maintain the reliability of structures and mechanical components subjected to severe loading conditions. Engineering spectra usually contain overloads and underloads which distribution may not be random. However for predicting the life of a structure, a simplified spectrum is usually determined from the real one, in order to reduce testing periods on prototypes. Therefore it is thus important to know which cycles can contribute to crack growth and which can be neglected. This paper presents an analysis of fatigue crack growth on M (T) specimens made of a medium carbon steel DIN Ck45. The specimens are subjected to repeated blocks of cycles made up of one or several (1, 2, 6 or 10) overloads (or underloads) separated by a variable number (10, 1000 or 10 000) of baseline cycles. The main objective of this study is to better understand the mechanisms at the origin of interactions effects due to the presence of overloads (or underloads) at different locations of each block loading. Under constant amplitude loading, single variables ΔK and Kmax are required in crack growth relationships. The transferability of fatigue laws, obtained under constant amplitude loading to variable amplitude fatigue, requires at least an additional variable, whose evolution with crack length accounts for the interactions effects between cycles of different types. Results have shown that the interaction effects in fatigue crack growth are closely related to the mechanisms of crack growth: cyclic plastic behaviour of the material and fracture surface roughness. Measurements of roughness of the surface fracture were carried out in both constant amplitude and variable amplitude tests. The roughness characterization helped to determine the importance of the mechanisms on variable amplitude fatigue crack growth and determine the influence of overloads/underloads on fatigue crack growth.