Manufacturing of aero engine components requires attention to residual stress and final shape of the product in order to meet high quality product standards.This sets very high demands on involved manufacturing steps to meet design requirements. Simulation of manufacturing processes can therefore be animportant tool to contribute to quality assurance.The focus in this work is on simulation of a manufacturing process chain comprising of sheet metal forming, welding and a stress relief heat treatment.Simulation of sheet metal forming can be used to design a forming tool design that accounts for the material behaviour, e.g. spring back, and avoid problems such as wrinkling, thinning and cracking. Moreover, the simulation can also show how the material is stretched and work hardened. The residual stresses after forming may be of local character or global depending on the shape that is formed. However, the heat affected zone due to welding is located near the weld.The weld also causes large residual stresses with the major component along the weld. It is found that the magnitude of the residual stresses after welding is affected by remaining stresses from the previous sheet metal forming. The final stress relieve treatment will relax these residual stresses caused by e.g. forming and welding. However, this causes additional deformations.The main focus of this study is on how a manufacturing process step affects the subsequent step when manufacturing a component of the nickel-based super alloy 718. The chosen route and geometry is a simplified leading edge of an exhaust case guide vane. The simulations were validated versus experiments. The computed deformations were compared with measurements after each manufacturing step. The overall agreement between experiments and measurement was good. However, not sufficiently accurate considering the required tolerance of the component. It was found from simulations that the residual stresses after each process affects the subsequent step. After a complete manufacturing process chain which ends with a stress relief heat treatment the residual stresses were not negligible. VIII Special experiments were performed for studying the stress relief in order to understand how the stresses evolve through the heat treatment cycle during relaxation. It was found that the stresses were reduced already during the beginning of the heating up sequence due to decreasing Young´s modulus and yield stress with increasing temperature. Relaxation due to creep starts when a certain temperature was reached which gave a permanent stress relief.

During the design phase, it creates and transforms ideas into products. It needs to know the manufacturing aspects for ensuring success and calculating the product cost while developing of designs. However, the choice one or another way of manufacturing, it will get slightly different results to the proposed design. The design teams require knowing some manufacturing alternatives for evaluate. This thesis has been proposed a select manufacturing process chain tool. The system modeled the design and manufacturing process data by select attributes and the process relationship. Moreover, the system uses “transformation concept” that represents the capability of each manufacturing process to modify a determinate design attribute. Finally, the system is developed as algorithm and build as part of a CAD platform. / Al llarg de la fase de disseny és on es creen les idees i es transformen en productes. La incorporació d’aspectes de fabricació en el desenvolupament dels dissenys permetrà assegurar-ne l’èxit i calcular-ne el cost. Tanmateix, l’elecció d’un o un altre camí de fabricació farà obtenir resultats lleugerament diferents al del disseny proposat. Fent que els equips de disseny precisin obtenir alternatives de fabricació durant la fase de disseny per a valorar les possibilitats. S’ha proposat, amb aquest tesis, una eina que estableix cadenes de processos de fabricació per a cada disseny. Per a desenvolupar-la s’ha modelitzat per mitja dels atributs la informació de disseny i la dels processos de fabricació, enriquit amb les relacions entre processos. S’ha completat l’obtenció de les cadenes amb l’ús del “concepte de transformada” que indica com pot alterar un procés un determinat atribut. Finalment s’ha desenvolupat un algoritme que combina ambdós parts i s’ha implementat com a part d’una plataforma CAD.