One piece wings made from superplastically formed (SPF) aluminium

Did you know that some models of the Morgan Sports Car boast components that are produced using superplastic forming?

Certain ... versions of the Morgan +8, +4 and 4/4 sports cars have a more curved body shape, a better hood line, improved head and legroom and increased visibility. More intriguingly from a materials engineering viewpoint, they will also feature one piece wings made from superplastically formed (SPF) aluminium.....
http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=555

Superplastic forming of titanium possible directly after casting

...Cast, coarse-grained titanium and Ti-6Al-4V have similar transformation-superplasticity characteristics to wrought or powder-metallurgical materials with finer grains. This may enable superplastic forming of titanium objects directly after casting, thus bypassing .... the thermomechanical processing steps needed to achieve fine-grain superplasticity.

Superplasticity in carbon nanotubes

"...A typical carbon nanotube can be stretched to 15 percent longer than its original length before it fails. But in the high-temperature experiments, the heated nanotube was able to stretch to more than 280 percent of its original length before it broke. The researchers took a 24-nanometer piece of nanotube and stretched it to 91 nanometers before it failed, while the diameter was reduced by 15 times from 12 to 0.8 nanometers.

“This kind of intense stretching and reduction in diameter in a carbon nanotube is unprecedented,” Wang said. “This super-elongation is due to a full plastic deformation that occurs at high temperatures.”

Under such high temperatures, the nanotube appears to be completely pliable, resulting in a superplastic deformation that would otherwise be impossible at low temperatures..."

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2006/NR-06-01-06.html

Euro SPF 2008

Dear collegues,

On behalf of the international EuroSPF programm committee, I am pleased to announce that the 6th European Conference on Superplastic Forming will take place in the old city of Carcassonne (France) form 3-5 septembre 2008.

As in the previous editions, this conference will be focussing on all aspect related to SuperPlastic forming, i.e. material science, process simulation, press design, die optimisation, part manufacturing, innovative low cost processes.

It welcomes experts from research intitutions and from industries. 6th European Conference on Superplastic Forming.

EuroSPF'2008
3-5 September 2008, Hotel Le Donjon (Best Western), Carcassonne, France

For more information, the conference Website will be available in a few days.

The important milestones are as follow:
- submission of abstracts : 30 april 2008
- acceptance : 16 mai 2008
- papers have to be handed over at the beginning of conference and will be peer-reviewed.

Please note that papers will be available worldwide on the open access archive HAL

We Hope that you will join this event,

Sincerely Yours

Gerard Bernhart
Conference Chairman

Prof. Gérard BernhartDirecteur du CROMeP (Centre de recherche Outillages, Matériaux et Procédés) (Research Centre on Tools, Materials and Forming Processes)Campus Jarlard - 81013 ALBI Cedex 09Tel : +33 (0)5 63 49 30 79E_mail : gerard.bernhart@enstimac.fr