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In this paper, the contact heating technology was combined with the warm and hot stamping process of high-strength aluminum alloy, and the corresponding experimental device was developed. For the contact heating-warm stamping process, it's found that as the heating temperature increases, the mechanical properties of the parts first decrease and then increase, while the springback decreases. Meanwhile, for the contact heating-hot stamping process, it's found that the aluminum alloy sheets experience large plastic deformation during contact heating, resulting in the refinement of microstructure and the increase in dislocation density, and the performance of the formed parts is improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Composite materials with complex internal microstructures, such as the flax nonwoven bio-composite studied in this work, require advanced numerical models in order to predict their mechanical performance. Otherwise, the micro-structural interactions that take place between their components makes very difficult to obtain their mechanical properties and failure mechanisms. This paper presents a novel methodology that couples two homogenization formulations: a phenomenological one, the serial-parallel mixing theory; and a numerical multiscale procedure. The resulting methodology has a minimal computational cost, while it is capable to account for the different interactions that take place among the composite constituents. With the proposed approach, it is possible to characterize the mechanical response of nonwoven composites and to predict their structural failure. The methodology developed is applied to a flax nonwoven bio-composite manufactured and tested by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The good results obtained from the simulation, when compared with the experimental values, allow considering the proposed procedure an excellent approach for the analysis of large structures made with complex microstructures, such as nonwoven biocomposites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]