Today we're going to talk about sheet metal

and how to make things from it.

My name's David Hart.
I'm professor of mechanical engineering
at MIT in the area of manufacturing.
And I'm going to try to take you in the next four modules
from a basic understanding of what sheet metal is
and how it's made through to how we can make
some basic products with it, and an understanding of the physics
that's behind all of that.
And I want to start off by looking
at a few of the products that you're familiar with and maybe
less familiar with in your everyday life that
are part of the sheet metal manufacturing.
Here's one-- maybe even used today--
a beverage can, actually a real miracle of sheet metal.
Basic chassis, metal chassis and other things like that
and a lot of the equipment that we have-- automobiles,
other things-- are essentially flat pieces
of sheet metal that have been cut with holes
and cut on the outline and bent.
So cutting and bending are two of the more basic operations
that can be used to transform a simple flat sheet
into something like a complex-- in this case--
shaped blade holder for razor blades.
And you can see here this actually has
a history of how this was made.
A blank starts, holes are punched in it,
shapes are cut out, and bending is done
to turn it into a final shape.
You can also imagine a much more complex product,
something you probably all have experienced, an airplane.
If you're walking into an airplane
and you're stuck in the doorway, look up,
and you'll see actually that the edge of the door
is sheet metal.
It's been riveted together so both the structure and the skin
is made out of sheet metal.
And that's also true for our friend the automobile.
And this is a fenderr-- or it once
was, at least, a fender-- for a car,
and you'll notice also that it's been made out of sheet metal
and formed to a very complex shape as compared to this.
So when we look at all these, we notice a couple things.
First of all, there's a lot of variety of shapes.
And we can actually give this a lot of structural integrity
by bending it.
And we can also sculpt it to very complex shapes--
this being very three dimensional shape,
here a more cylindrical shape, but changing the shape
quite a bit.
Lastly and maybe most importantly,
I can hold this up.
It's not very heavy, and yet it has
a lot of structural capability.
And so one of the reasons we like to make things out
of sheet metal is it's very economical in terms
of the material and lightweight, and yet very strong.
And the other thing which this doesn't tell you, but it does
illustrate that it's very fast.
These separate operations here could
be happening at several times per second-- in some cases,
with cans, up to 300 times per minute.
So it can be a very rapid operation.
Now what we're going to do in these modules
is study really only a couple different operations--
the cutting operation, making holes,
making lines, blanking things out, and the bending operation.
So basic bending we'll look at to really just understand
something as simple as this.
How do I take a piece of sheet metal
and bend it so that I get a desired shape?
OK.
It'll be a little bit more complicated
than that, but not a whole lot.
Now how do we define sheet metal?
It's obviously a metal.
It can be made out of any metal that's
ductile enough to be turned into thin material.
So we can talk about a range of different things.
Let's talk about automobile parts.
We're talking about a thickness on the order
of five hundredths of an inch.
For an airplane, that thickness is about twice as much,
more like nine-tenths of an inch.
And not the final can, but the disk of aluminum
that you start with on this, can be as thin
as one-hundredths of an inch.
So you're talking about very, very thin material
to start with.
Actually, all of you can go home probably
and find an interesting piece of sheet metal
in the cupboard, which would be aluminum foil, which is thinner
still.
So it really depends on our ability
to produce these materials inexpensively,
but with good uniformity.
One of the lessons that we'll learn as we go through this
is that this process, as much or more
than any other manufacturing process,
is extremely dependent on the fundamental material
properties of this material.
So we want to get a sense of how it's made.
And it's a basic metals process starting
with a casting, an ingot that then
goes through a set of rolls, which will take that ingot,
roll it down to a much thinner cross-section--
typically done hot so that it deforms easily.
But hot rolling is typically limited
to much thicker material.
You get a poorer surface quality, poorer thickness
control, and it's done really just
to get the process started.
If you're building a ship and you
want to use thick plates and other things like that,
you would stop with the hot rolled.
But then you do a secondary operation
where it's the same thing, except that you're
starting with thinner material, and bring it
down to a much thinner-- and this would be cold rolling.
And here's the key difference-- with the cold rolling,
you're doing pure deformation at roughly room temperature.
And what you're doing then is a lot
of cold working of the material.
The controlled deformation is such
that you get much better tolerances on the material,
but at the same time, you're work hardening it,
and because of this directionality,
you tend to give the material anisotropy.
It's different in the longitudinal direction
than in the cross-direction.
In fact, in some of these materials--
you can see it a little bit in here-- at least I can--
there's actually a little bit of detectable striations here
telling you what the rolling direction was.
OK.
So what's important from a fundamental mechanics
point of view?
As you noticed on this-- I'm going to straighten it out
for you real quickly-- if I bend it only a little bit,
it comes back.
Right?
So I actually have to do plastic deformation for this
to remain a useful part.
If it springs back to flat, it's not very useful anymore.
So when we look at the basic constitutive properties
of the sheet, we care about the elastic region,
as you can see in that, but we also care maybe more
about the plastic.
So just to be sure we have all the definitions in place
that we want, let's look at a classic stress strain diagram.

We know that we have an elastic region,

and oversimplifying it a bit, the yield point
is the point at which we depart from purely elastic behavior
and start to get plastic deformation, usually
in a non-linear fashion.
And as the material goes up, it continues
to harden if you will, and the stress continues to go up.
And if you keep going, it reaches a peak.
You usually get some sort of a necking, and then it fails.
So this would be your classic tension test, which you may
or may not have seen before.
So with sheet metal forming, if we
don't get some if not all of the sheet into this state,
we don't get any shape.
And one way to look at that is that-- and we'll
look at this in the bending case--
if I were to load up a tensile specimen, for example, loaded
up above yield, but before the failure point, and to let go,
it would come down on a line with that same slope.
And we would have our permanent or plastic strain left in it.
And this becomes the final shape, if you will,
of that tensile specimen.
So this kind of behavior is going
to be extremely important to understand
in the context of stretching and bending of sheet metal.
The only other property from here
that we really need to know about right
now is the ultimate tensile strength because as we'll see,
we can relate that to the process of cutting.
If you're already familiar with something like machining,
where your cutting material by imposing a large shear
force on it, that's actually the same thing
we're going to be doing when we cut sheet metal.
And in some of the basic formulas for understanding
the forces required for that, that
becomes the most important property.
So in the next few modules, what we'll do
is we'll go through how to understand the basic operations
here and actually get to the point
where we can predict some behavior.
And we'll show you a demonstration
of how that works as well.