Federico Mazzanti is a Ph.D. researcher in I-Form and is based in UCD working in the area of computational analysis for metal forming. He obtained his undergraduate First Class Honours degree in Nanotechnology from Technological University Dublin in 2020 and then started his Ph.D. in metal forming soon after. His main research interests are in the areas of finite volume method, metal forming for high-strength steels and computational studies.
Research Interests (Lay Summary)
Since moving to I-Form in 2020, Federico Mazzanti has been working on novel numerical methods for analysing metal forming of high-strength steels. Steel is a material, which is widely used in the automotive industry, due to its high recyclability, quality, durability, affordability and lower fuel consumption. Understanding and predicting metal forming is vital to the production of various structural components, as their formability strictly dictates the properties of the final product.
Technical Summary
The aim of his work is to analyse metal forming of high-strength steels by using numerical methods, such as finite volume method and compare it to the current state-of-the-art finite element methods. Mathematical methods are increasingly being used in the industry to model metal forming during the industrial process of part and product fabrication, as they are fast, reliable and reduce manufacturing costs. There exist many different material processing techniques, but the main focus of the project is on drawing and rolling. These processes are widely used to fabricate bars and rods of complex cross section profiles and, in order to predict the final shape of the metal piece, it would be useful to implement a roller design tool that could help to best optimize the results of the industrial processing techniques.
One way to accomplish this is to utilize finite element or finite volume methods. The main focus of his project will be looking into implementing new finite volume methods that might have advantages over the current state-of-the-art finite element methods. Finite volume methodologies applied to metal forming is a relatively new research area when compared to finite element methods. Therefore, this project can contribute to the current research in the field by initially looking at the current methods and improving their performance, accuracy and robustness for metal forming of high-strength steel wires and rods.
Expertise
Computational Mechanics, Injection Moulding, Metallurgy, Process Modeling