PROCESS OPTIMIZATION IN FORMING TECHNOLOGY

A highly flexible and completely reliable manufacturing process is nee ded in order to satisfy current market requirements, while maintaining low production costs. In order to meet these competitive conditions, it is necessary to incorporate innovative ideas and to carry out conti nuous further development of the manufacturing processes. Forming proc esses are nonlinear in terms of materials behaviour, frictional charac teristics and the large degree of freedom in the selection of manufact ured geometries. In addition process control is made difficult as a re sult of the variations in material thickness and dimensions in each st age of the forming process. The exact mathematical simulation of these processes is either impossible or can only be achieved using major si mplifications. Adaptive or ''learning'' control systems offer the poss ibility of improving the precision of manufacturing or reproducibility . The intelligent controllers, which are superimposed on the basic reg ulation and control loops, verify their setting parameters by measurem ent of significant process parameters and optimise these simultaneousl y with the process. In this article a guide for the development of an adaptive platform will be presented, based on various processes in the area of forming technology. At the same time procedures and methods f or process optimisation and control, using modern computer systems, co nstitute another major effort to obtain knowledge easily and completel y from process-specific data and series of measurements.