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The superplastic forming process is used to fabricate parts with complex geometry for both commercial and military aircraft. Elimination of fasteners and reduction of part count, assembly time and weight can be realized with the superplastic forming process, but tool design and forming process development costs and schedule must be minimized. Boeing has developed and used computer analysis and simulation software to help design tooling and develop the forming process. Within the Integrated Product Team (IPT) environment at Boeing, analysis is leveraged with tool design and manufacturing experience to reduce the tooling design and process development time. The capability to predict final part thickness within 5% allows tooling designs to be developed and weight and performance to be predicted early in the design cycle. Examples show the predicted improvement in part thickness uniformity caused by tool design, preforming and forming process control.

Forming of metal is a very challenging problem. To optimize a particular forming process the manufacturing engineer needs to determine the relationship between several dependent material properties and the independent forces on the metal that are generated by the press and tooling. The classical method to optimize a forming process relies on experience and trial and error development techniques. The forming of aluminum, when compared to steel, requires more development work to optimize the forming process. Finite element analysis provides a method to quickly perform the trial and error iterations necessary to optimize the forming of aluminum.