Background and activities

Background. Welo  holds a MSc. and a Ph.D. within  plastic bending behavior  of aluminum alloy structures  from NTH, Department of Structural Engineering. His working experience includes Sintef Production Engineering, Sintef Materials Technology, Hydro Automotive Structures in both US and EU, the latter in combination with an adjunct professorship at Department of Engineering Design and Materials (IPM), NTNU. Since 2007 he has been full time professor within Design and Manufacturing at IPM. Over the past two decades, Welo has experience from different roles in boards, committees,  task groups and associations, mainly in metal forming, automotive and aluminum industries.

Research Fields. Metal forming in general - bending of aluminum profiles and related technology development  in particular - are the most central research areas. His research fields also includes product development; particularly Lean Product Development, focusing on the process of generating and generalizing knowledge that can be used (and reused) by product developers to create a recipe to produce an attractive product with maximum customer value (i.e. benefit-to-cost ratio). The (inter)relationship between design, function and manufacturability are important issues in lean product development.

Entrepreneurship – Innovation. Welo has been central in developing models and tools for designing metal forming dies (dimensional stability), as well as new forming technologies (methods) (3D bending/forming, stretch forming, mechanical calibration, adaptive bending, etc.). He has also been heading and coaching product development teams developing light weight solutions in the automotive industry, including aluminum space frames, subframes, cockpit frames, engine cradles, seat frames, seat tracks, bump and front end structures, crush cans, etc. for a number of European and US car models and platforms.

Publications. Most open publications are within metal forming problems related to aluminum, including extrusion, hot and cold forming, calibration and bending. Many of these are available in data bases such as Frida, ScienceDirect, etc.

 

Teaching – Courses.

 MM8200 Aluminum technology: Extrusion and Forming  (Ph.D., fall)

TMM4500 -TMM4 In-depth course, Analysis of Metal Forming Processes (fall

TMM4505 In-depth course (fall)

TMM4112 Design of Machine Elements (spring)

 

Scientific, academic and artistic work

A selection of recent journal publications, artistic productions, books, including book and report excerpts. See all publications in the database

Journal publications