Grant: Automotive Partnership Canada Project

The proposed research will focus on the development, assessment and commercialization of manufacturing methods tofabricate next generation light weight thermal management systems by Dana Canada. The current research teamrecently completed a significant Collaborative R&D project entitled ""Warm forming of aluminium alloy sheet"" underfunding from NSERC, the Ontario Research Fund {Initiative for Automotive Manufacturing Innovation) and DanaCanada. This previous project, referred to herein as Phase I, with the current APC proposal representing Phase II, hasdemonstrated that warm forming has strong potential to increase formability of brazing sheet, increasing the range ofpotential product designs and/or reducing the number of forming operations required to meet a particular design.As such, this research is ripe for commercialization and Dana Canada, with its partners at the University of Waterloo andCAN MET, wishes to pursue the next steps to realize commercial implementation of this warm forming technology withinits manufacturing operations. Key requirements to be addressed in this project are further development of the warmforming process to: (i) extend the range of achievable deep draw performance and ascertain the potential of warmforming to produce consistently flat components for brazing; (ii) characterize the as-formed brazing performance and asbrazedcorrosion performance of warm formed materials; and, (iii) develop production-ready warm forming processesand equipment.The primary research tasks include (a) Identification and characterization of high performance warm forminglubricants, (b) Warm forming experiments and process optimization for low cycle time, (c) warm forming modeldevelopment and process optimization, and {d) characterization of as-formed component integrity, post forming brazeassessment and as-brazed corrosion testing. This scope of work will feature experimental and analytical research thatwill serve as proof of concept of the warm forming processing route.