Microforming process and process realization for micro-scaled product development

Dr M. W. Fu

Bibliography

Dr M. W. Fu received his B.Eng and M.Eng in Materials Science and Engineering from the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi'an, China, and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore, Singapore. Before he went to Singapore for his career development, he had worked in China as a faculty member and conducted many projects funded by governmental agencies and industries. In 1991 and 1994, he received the honorary awards of Outstanding Young Teacher and Outstanding Teacher from the Ministry of Aeronautic and Astronautic Industries of P. R. China. During his eight and a half years tenure of the faculty appointment in the Mainland China, he was promoted to associate and full professor via the fast track promotion scheme in 1992 and 1995, respectively. In 1997, he joined the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology as a Senior Research Engineer. In Aug 2006, he shifted to Hong Kong and was employed by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a faculty member. His research endeavors include integrated product and process design and development, metal forming technologies, dies and molds CAD, micro-scaled metallic product development and processing of advanced materials, including Ti-alloys and bulk metallic glasses. Dr. Fu is a Senior Member of Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). He is also sitting in the editorial board of the longstanding Int J of Advanced Manufacturing Technology (SCI journal), the Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering-English (SCI journal), and the Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering-Chinese. Dr Fu is also serving as an invited reviewer for many SCI journals, prestigious project awards, and funding applications. He has 130 papers published/accepted by SCI journals and three monographs arising from his researches. The latest one will be published in 2015. In addition, his paper in micro-forming was awarded the Outstanding Paper in the 7th International Conference on micro-manufacturing, Chicago, USA, 2012. His original contribution paper entitled “ductile fracture: experiments and computations” published in International Journal of Plasticity in 2011 is listed as the Highly Cited Paper in ISI web of Knowledge.

Keynote Speaking Title & Synopsis

Title:  Microforming process and process realization for micro-scaled product development

Product miniaturization is an emerging trend for facilitating product usage, enabling unique product functions to be implemented in micro-scaled geometries and features, and further reducing product weight and volume. Recently, a demand for microparts increases significantly in many industry clusters. Development of the advanced micromanufacturing technologies for fabrication of such microparts has thus become a critical issue. Microforming, which offers attractive characteristics including high productivity, low cost and good quality of the formed parts, provides a promising approach to manufacturing metallic microparts. In the last two decades, a lot of efforts have been made to the researches on the size effect related deformation behaviors in microforming processes and the development of the processes. Obtaining a panorama of these researches is necessary to support micropart design and development via microforming and further advance this micromanufacturing technology. This talk presents an intensive review on the latest development of microforming technologies. It is firstly focused on the size effect related deformation phenomena and mechanisms on the changes of flow stress, flow behavior, fracture behavior, elastic recovery, tooling-workpiece interfacial friction and surface finish of the formed part. The state-of-the-art microforming processes, including micro deep drawing, microembossing, micropunching, microcoining, microextrusion, microheading and micro progressive forming, are then presented. The future research issues are also raised. Most importantly, how to realize the mass production of microparts via microforming is also also discussed.