Founded in 1974, the Centre for Material Forming is one of the 18 research centres of Mines ParisTech. It moved to Sophia Antipolis in 1976 with the will of being involved in the creation of a new high technology science park on the French Riviera. It has been associated with CNRS, the French National Science Foundation, since 1979 (Unité Mixte de Recherche 7635).

• Its mission is threefold :
  • transmission of the knowledge and of the know-how of CEMEF to engineers or researchers during their training at the Centre,
  • research,
  • active collaboration with Industry.

• CEMEF is an European leader in the field of research on materials processing.
  Approximately 130 people - among whom 50 PhD students - are working on research designed to get in depth understanding of forming processes ; these topics are focused around three scientific axes :
  
  • Material flows, tools must resist => thermomechanical axis of continuous media;
  • Material orients, crystallises or forms textures => flow - crystallisation - morphology relations axis;
  • Material exhibits friction on the tools => surfaces and contact mechanics axis;
  • multi-scale modelling for manufacturing processes.
    
    
• CEMEF is largely involved in higher education :

    - two masteres : "Materials and Processing", et "Computational Mechanics", the last one in collaboration with Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées;
    - one master : "Materials Physics, Mechanics and Numerical Modelisation" jointly with Nice/Sophia-Antipolis University;
    - a postmaster degree in bioplastics
    - two doctorates of Ecole des Mines de Paris "Materials Science and Engineering" and "Computational Mechanics"

• Advanced Computing in Material Forming group: The vocation of the group is to elaborate numerical methods allowing to efficiently solving the problems arising from the numerical simulation in material forming. These studies aim at eliminating major bolts such as computing time, mesh generation or reliability of results. The group activity applies in fields that are genuine numerical challenges, like forging, filling (injection or casting), foaming and process optimisation. Forge3® and Rem3D® are the main software platforms of the group.