This proposal requests funds to permit Dr. Daeyong Lee, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), to pursue with Dr. Dong Nyung Lee, Department of Metallurgical Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU), for a period of 24 months, a program of cooperative research on sheet material formability. The research will add an international cooperative dimension to research supported at RPI under NSF Grant No. DMC-8415309. The principal objective of that work was to develop a computer-aided engineering (CAE) software system which can be used by engineers at the design stage to determine whether or not a particular thermoplastic part can be manufactured successfully by a solid phase forming method. In the cooperative project, the analytical results obtained at RPI and their theoretical bases will be examined carefully at SNU in regard to validity, accuracy, and usefulness. The analytical formulation will be modified at RPI if experimental results obtained at SNU warrant it. This project will combine the talents of two complementary research teams. The one, at RPI, has developed and is refining a CAD/CAE system for predicting the forming limits in sheet materials. The other, at SNU, has the capability for analyzing and testing the validity of the CAD/CAE system in predicting formability limits. The product of their cooperative effort, an accurate, valid system, will be of great value to engineers in the U.S. and Korea. The collaborators are highly respected workers in the field of this research. This project is relevant to the objectives of the U.S.-Korea Cooperative Science Program which seeks to increase the level of cooperation between U.S. and Korean scientists and engineers through the exchange of scientific information, ideas, skills, and techniques and through collaboration on problems of mutual benefit.
