Manufacturing of surface features from extrusion forging and extrusion rolling of sheet metals

Engineered surfaces are commonly designed to achieve certain desirable functionalities. Manufacturing of engineered surfaces often requires innovative techniques. In this paper, a sheet metal surface with pin fin features is proposed for potential thermal or fluid flow management applications. Experiments and numerical simulations were carried out to demonstrate that extrusion-forging process can be used to create such micro scale surface features. Preliminary results from simulations also show that it is feasible to use extrusion-rolling process to manufacture pin fin features to increase productivity and reduce cost. The work suggests that extrusion-rolling technique has good potential for large scale manufacturing of various innovative surfaces features.