Steel plates are widely used in many manufacturing areas such as ship and bridge construction industries and are fabricated by different forming processes. Steel plates can have various shape defects, such as curl or camber. Roller leveling reduces the magnitude of the residual stress by using small amounts of reverse bending via an appropriate arrangement of the rolls and the associated plastic deformation in the steel plate. In this study a model for the residual stress after roller leveling is developed. In order to simplify the formulation, a plane-strain condition is assumed and the stress in the thickness direction is assumed to be negligible. The camber deformation in a real sized plate are measured and compared with the prediction values from the model to validate the accuracy of the model.

Despite its importance the control of roller leveling has primarily relied on the operator's experience and on operation tables. In order to effectively eliminate various shape defects, the optimal leveling condition for a specific mode of plate deformation needs to be determined as well as a careful evaluation as to whether or not the condition is still appropriate for other modes or not. A numerical model, which considers both computation efficiency and accuracy, has been developed. The variations of residual stress are studied according to the entry and the delivery intermeshes, respectively. The camber deformation decreases linearly as the entry intermesh increases. In contrast the curl deformation does not vary directly with the entry intermesh. Therefore, the optimum intermesh values need to be determined in order to simultaneously minimize both the camber and the curl deformation.

Tube hydroforming is a technology that utilizes hydraulic pressure to form a tube into desired shapes inside die cavities. Due to its advantages, such as weight reduction, increased strength, improved quality, and reduced tooling cost, single-layered tube hydroforming is widely used in industry. However in some special applications, it is necessary to produce multi-layered tubular components which have corrosion resistance, thermal resistance, conductivity, and abrasion resistance. In this study, a hollow forming process to fabricate a part from multi-layered tubes for structural purposes is proposed. To accomplish a successful hydroforming process, an analytical model that predicts optimal load path for various parameters such as tube material properties, thickness of tubes, diameter of holes and the number of holes was developed. Tubular hydroforming experiments to fabricate a hollow part were performed and the optimal loading path developed by the analytical model was successfully verified. The results show that the proposed hydroforming process can effectively produce hollow parts with multi-layered tube without defects such as wrinkling or fracture.

In this study, a micro/nano-random-pattern-structure surface was machined by electric discharge machining (EDM) followed by replicating the EDM surface with a silicone elastomer having low energy and greater hydrophobicity. The variation of hydrophobicity was of prime interest and was examined as a function of the surface roughness of the replicated silicone elastomer. The hydrophobicity was evaluated by the water contact angle (WCA) measured on the relevant surface. For the experiments, the original surfaces were machined by die sinking electric discharge machining (DS-EDM) and wire cutting electric discharge machining (WC-EDM). The ranges of surface roughness were Ra $0.8{\sim}19{\mu}m$ for the DS-EDM and Ra $0.5{\sim}4.7{\mu}m$ for the WC-EDM. In order to fabricate a hydrophobic surface, the EDM surfaces were directly replicated using a liquid-state silicone elastomer, which was thermally cured. The measured WCA on the replicated surfaces for DS-EDM was in the range of $115{\sim}130^{\circ}$ and for WC-EDM the WCA was in the range of $123{\sim}150^{\circ}$. Additionally, the dynamic hydrophobicity was evaluated by measuring an advancing and a receding WCA on the replicated silicone elastomer surfaces.

In this study, springback amounts of an S-rail are quantitatively compared according to the hardening model using a finite element simulation for the stamping process with high strength steels. For comparison of the hardening models, two types of hardening models were investigated. The two models were isotropic hardening and kinematic hardening. For the analysis with kinematic hardening, the Yoshida-Uemori model was selected. Five kinds of springback modes were measured at designated sections and a comparison was made between the experiment and the analyses with two types of hardening models. The analysis results show that the springback in the flange and the wall curl are predicted more accurately with a kinematic hardening model.

The present study examines the micro-pattern replication on a plastic film using ultrasonic imprinting. Ultrasonic imprinting uses ultrasonic waves to generate repetitive microscale deformation in the polymer film. The resulting deformation heat on the surface of the film causes the surface region to soften sufficiently so that a replication of the micro-pattern can be obtained. To successfully replicate the micro-pattern on a large area of polymer film, a high replication ratio is needed as well as good uniformity over the entire region. In this study, a horn design is investigated by finite element analysis and is optimized through a response surface analysis. In the ultrasonic imprinting experiments, the response surface method was also used to determine the optimal processing conditions for better replication characteristics.

The bicycle is one of the most important eco-friendly transport methods which can mitigate global warming. The portability of a bike on public transportation systems is essential for the wide spread use of bicycles by people in urban environments. In this study, a lightweight urban folding bike was developed with careful consideration of the association with public transport. A folding frame using a moving slide link mechanism made from AL6061 is proposed. Numerical analysis was conducted to evaluate structural safety of the bike in both vertical and pedal loading tests. The proposed urban folding bicycle weights only 10kg and summation of its width, length, and height in the folded configuration is under 158cm.

As the adoption of injection molding technology increases, injected-molded optical products require higher dimensional accuracy and optical stability than ever before. In the present study, four kinds of molding methods, i.e., conventional injection molding (CIM), injection/compression molding (ICM), rapid heat and cooling the mold(RHCM) and rapid injection/compression molding (RICM) were selected in order to investigate the optical anisotropy of a 7 inch Light Guide Plate(LGP) by examining the gap-wise distribution of birefringence and the extinction angle. The results indicate that the compression process can decrease flow-induced birefringence over the whole region and that rapid heating can decrease the birefringence level better than conventional molding. In addition, for the combination of compression and rapid heating a reversal flow was detected from the distribution of the extinction angle near the gate.