The effect of tool eccentricity on the joint strength in clinching process was investigated. The objective is to understand the mechanical behavior of the clinched joint where proper control on the alignment setting of tools can be considered. In this research, a clinching process to form a round joint was carried out by offsetting the centre line between the upper punch and lower die. The experimental results were compared between offset conditions. Coated mild steel sheet were used for the evaluation. It is found that the strength values by offset clinching exhibit variation in sinusoidal relationship with respect to the in-plane offset direction.

A computational technique of rigid-plastic finite element method by using the Eulerian meshing method was developed to deal with large deformation problem in metal forming by replacing the conventional way of applying complicated remeshing schemes when using the Lagrange’s elements. During metal forming process, a workpiece normally undergoes large deformation and causes severe distortion of elements in finite element analysis. The distorted element may lead to instability in numerical calculation and divergence of non-linear solution in finite element analysis. With Eulerian elements, the initial elements are generated to fix into a specified analytical region with particles implanted as markers to form the body of a workpiece. The particles are allowed to flow between the elements after each deformation step to show the deforming pattern of material. Four types of cold forging and sheet metal clinching were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the presented method. The proposed method is found to be effective by comparing the results on dimension of the final product, material flow behaviour and punch load versus stroke obtained from simulation and experiment.

Outcome‐based education (OBE) is widely adopted in engineering programs worldwide. However, the conventional methods often involve arbitrary procedures requiring lecturers to assume initial values in defining the OBE matrices. This may lead to the mismatch between the students' program outcomes (PO) attainment with the stakeholders' expectations. Thus, a dynamic OBE model by explicitly incorporating the assessment marks into the OBE matrices is introduced and verified quantitatively and qualitatively. Network models were used to visualize the connections between the assessment tools with specific CO and PO to demonstrate how the OBE is measured and improved. The qualitative data from the surveys involved year one chemical engineering students aged between 20 and 22, who attended both Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamic courses in the particular semester. These subjects measured PO, namely engineering knowledge and problem analysis, which are fundamental to an engineering program. The quantitative data were compared to verify the hypotheses with a reference scheme defined to measure the success rate. The results reveal a 67% success rate in matching the lecturer ratings on the same PO measured from student performance. The correlation comparisons showed that the dynamic OBE model attained higher accuracy, indicating that the PO scores aligned closely with actual student performances. The comparison on matching the respective PO scores between the two courses shows a poor success rate of 44%, indicating that the student performances on PO are not equally the same. The dynamic OBE model has effectively measured the PO from the hypotheses on stakeholders' perspectives.

In this project, a rigid plastic Finite Element Method (FEM) simulator was developed for simulating the plastic flow material in rotary forming. The simulation result was able to predict the cup height of the final product up to an accuracy of 80% and the localized deformation which leads to failure in the deformation process. The workability of the aluminum disc was also studied to understand the material flow behavior under incremental bending and flow forming by utilizing a lathe machine.

A simulator based on rigid-plastic finite element method is developed for simulating the plastic flow of material in forging processes. In the forging process likes backward extrusion, a workpiece normally undergoes large deformation around the tool corners that causes severe distortion of elements in finite element analysis. Since the distorted elements may induce instability of numerical calculation and divergence of nonlinear solution in finite element analysis, a computational technique of using the Euler’s fixed meshing method is proposed to deal with large deformation problem by replacing the conventional way of applying complicated remeshing schemes when using the Lagrange’s elements. With this method, the initial elements are generated to fix into a specified analytical region with particles implanted as markers to form the body of a workpiece. The particles are allowed to flow between the elements after each deformation step to show the deforming pattern of material. The proposed method is found to be effective in simulating complicated material flow inside die cavity which has many sharp edges, and also the extrusion of relatively slender parts like fins. In this paper, the formulation of rigid-plastic finite element method based on plasticity theory for slightly compressible material is introduced, and the advantages of the proposed method as compared to conventional one are discussed.