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.

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In this study, A356 aluminum alloy was heated up to semi-solid state and used as a billet for forward and backward extrusion. The workpiece will undergo solidification at the contact between billet and the tools when the material flowing through the die cavity during the semi-solid extrusion. The plasticity of A356 with 0.3wt% Y at semi-solid state was investigated by performing compression test. A numerical simulation code based on thermo-viscoplastic finite element method was developed to simulate the material flow and study the yttrium-modified A356 aluminum alloy under forward and backward extrusion. A minimum average punch strain rate is proposed for semi-solid extrusion.

A simulator based on rigid-plastic finite element method is developed with two common friction law: Coulomb friction law and constant shear friction law are imposed. This project is to develop a simple method to identify tribological properties of various lubricants by metal forming method. In this project, the influence of different lubricants was studied by using ring compression test. The deformation of the ring compression test was measured to obtain an experimental friction calibration curves under different lubricants. To model the friction effect, theoretical friction calibration curves for Coulomb friction law and shear friction law are generated under various parameter of μ, coefficient of friction (Coulomb friction law) and m, shear factor (constant shear friction law). The experimental and theoretical friction calibration curves were compared and the result shows corresponding. The friction of the lubricants was further verified by using a common method: pulling a block on flat surface with load sensor yields the friction force, F in the basic equation F=μN where N is the normal force. The results match the calibration curves too.