A MANUFACTURE CONSTRAINED DESIGN METHODOLOGY APPLICATION FOR A TAILORED FORMING HYBRID COMPONENT

Components with high performance, such as light weight, long life-cycle, good cost-benefit and other specific properties, are a constant goal of the industry. To achieve such performances, a constant progress is required in both manufacturing and design processes. These two areas must develop together and connected, at the same time that one challenges the other. Tailored Forming is a new manufacturing technique in development, which consists in a process chain to create massive hybrid material structures made of two different metals. This new technology presents a new range of manufacturing restrictions and requires a suitable design methodology to deal with the multi-material problem. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the methodology that is currently being used to generate feasible designs for Tailored Forming. This methodology consists in an optimization tool that searches for an optimal material distribution and generates a first concept for the component, and a parametric analysis that generates a large solution space with a finer ready-to-use design result. Some examples of the applicability of these tools are here showed, with focus on a current Tailored Forming demonstrator, which is a hybrid shaft. Despite the simplicity of this application, it involves a challenging implementation, due to the manufacturing restrictions present. At the end, a final design is presented, which is not only suitable for the manufacturing process but also raises the advantages that this technology provides.