Bringing bending ideas to life with FormFlow – Manufactures Monthly

FormFlow is founded on a world-first innovation with an Australian-made building material icon. Manufacturers’ Monthly sits down with the company’s founders to find out how the technology is developing new building products, systems and manufacturing solutions.

Dr Matt Dingle, FormFlow founder, began to explain the Australian company’s bending technology for corrugated steel by relating it to origami.
“The same theory applies to make this bend work,” he said. “By folding it in a particular way, you don’t stretch or compress the material at all, using surprisingly little force you can create the bends that we’ve created without damaging the coating.
“There’s no one way of doing it. We’ve recently developed a process which forms a similar shape but in a different way, but it’s all about how you create the complex shapes. With carefully defined geometry you need to maintain the surface developability to ensure you don’t damage the material.”
The genesis for this innovation was engineering marvel, John Duncan, now 90 years old, and his late cousin Jim Duncan, who discovered the mathematical theorems of folding ‘intextensional’ curved sheet. The story goes, Duncan and his cousin were at McDonalds observing the casing for one of its famous apple pies, where you squeeze the packaging on the sides and push the ends in. All these years later, FormFlow’s technology holds a similar theory – basically inverting peaks into valleys to create shapes without damaging the material.
“Duncan was a brilliant academic with a practical understanding – he saw the potential of the type of process that we’ve eventually commercialised and set about with his cousin to develop the mathematics to be able to design those surfaces and make them work,” Dingle explained.
An engineer by trade, Dingle completed his PhD at Deakin University in partnership with Ford in 2001. This reawakened his love for developing ideas into working solutions – working both in product development and on his academic project with the automobile manufacturer.
After starting his own engineering consulting company, he decided to join forces with some students he taught at Deakin University and an ex-colleague from Ford to start a company to realise the idea of developing a fully carbon-fibre wheel.
This business adventure led to the establishment of FormFlow, where Dingle approached Geelong based engineering company Austeng for assistance in 2016 to develop a prototype machine to validate a new bending concept for corrugated steel. Following successful preliminary trials in September 2016, FormFlow was born.
With the tutelage and research of Mr Duncan, FormFlow filed a patent and registered designs quickly after its inception, having worked long and hard on the basis of the idea before the company was founded. Over the next six months, FormFlow and Austeng collaborated on developing an industrial scale machine to bend commercial grade corrugated sheets.
The world first metal forming process has now been used to create forward-thinking products for the building industry. The company has grown into using prefabricated building systems that complement the bend, leading to the expansion into manufacturing both commercial and residential modular buildings at its facility in North Shore, Victoria.
FormFlow Living’s modular construction
FormFlow decided to embed its technologies into a commercial product, which forms the basis of FormFlow Living. The company’s range of pre-fabricated buildings can adapt to changing needs, whether that’s adding a home office or increasing the living space.
Unlike a typical build which starts with foundations on site, FormFlow starts the building process in its factory in Geelong. Modular building is gaining momentum, but Dingle sees a lot of mistakes being made in a growing space.
“The conventional construction approach involves a whole series of sequential processes and you obviously can’t finish one until the next one starts,” Dingle noted. “What we’ve done is divide the building up into a series of sub-assemblies, which can all be done in parallel. You can have a team of people and bring all these sub-assemblies together in one assembly line, which dramatically increases the throughput on a small footprint. If you’re going to do things in the conventional way, you need a massive factory to do it. We reckon
FormFlow uses its bending technology for its modular living spaces. you can do higher volumes than that in a pretty small footprint.”
A steel structural frame is welded and bolted together to form the bones of the new building, then particleboard flooring and prefabricated TRUECORE steel wall frames are installed. The highly developed production system works to speed up the construction process. While the steel is being welded and bolted together, FormFlow’s team at the factory are fixing the ply and insulation to the prefabricated wall frames prior to installing them. This means, once the steel is ready to go, the team can quickly and simply install the wall frames without the time-consuming act of plastering and painting. Key worker housing, flood relief, NDIS, social and affordable housing all contribute to the huge demand for quality, fast and sustainable housing.
“We’re trying to take more of a manufacturing approach,” he said. “We spent a lot of time learning from what currently is in the market. Most of the companies that we see out there now are effectively just bringing construction under a roof so there’s not a lot of manufacturing thinking going on. It certainly brings some efficiencies to take a true manufacturing assembly line approach to building, this is where you’ll really start to see the benefits.”
With less time on site, no exposure to the impact of weather conditions, a prefabricated home can get people into a new living space within weeks rather than months. FormFlow’s team continues to pioneer modular building design and manufacturing, combining Computer Aided Design with advanced technologies for process monitoring and quality control.
“We set up these small 1000 to 15,000 sqm sites wherever the housing is needed and have people employed locally to manufacture our buildings using our products,” Dingle said.
“We’ve just gone through a process of developing a standard range of designs. One of the things we’ve learned in the last two years is that trying to do prefabrication with custom designs is really challenging – there’s always a lot of design work required so we’ve tried to look for standardisation opportunities.”
To scale up FormFlow Living’s delivery model, the company will soon offer the building systems to customers under license and are also establishing its first regional manufacturing hub in South West Victoria later this year.
Industry 4.0 innovations for steel forming
Collaboration, rather than competition, is key to bringing forward FormFlow’s amazing technology to as many applications as possible, according to Dingle.
“We are collaborating with the materials and engineering groups at Deakin University as well as the School of Architecture,” he said. “It’s absolutely vital as a way of exploring these bigger problems that you simply don’t have the bandwidth, or the capacity to deal with within your own business.”
FormFlow recently concluded a research collaboration with Deakin which delivered new commercial solutions for the steel forming industry.
The project, supported by the Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC), was designed to establish an Industry 4.0 manufacturing cell to control and optimise FormFlow’s corrugated steel bending process.
Matthias Weiss, Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University and cofounder of FormFlow, said the idea of the project was to create a commercial- scale forming process tracking the right variables to achieve consistent quality and reliability.
Weiss, originally from Germany, studied material science and met his friend Dingle when he visited Germany to recruit Weiss for his PhD project. He is extremely experienced in rollforming related research and studies of ultra- high strength metals for automotive and aerospace. Much of his recent research has been on further developing bending processes.
“Based on the origami principle, you need to calculate specifically where you want the material to go and then calculate and develop the surfaces so that the material wants to go there,” he explained. “As soon as you force it, you’re destined to fail. For me it was the perfect combination because it involves the pre- rollform material in the corrugated sheet with a process that technically should be a pure bend. For the last ten years I have been working on pure bending, where you can get even bad material to form rather well.”
While undertaking fundamental research into the industry 4.0 solution, the project team identified additional outcomes that would deliver greater efficiencies.
The first is a 2D laser system that monitors the cross-sectional shape of sheets before and after bending and enables the manufacturer to perform continuous quality control.
In 2019, FormFlow licensed its foundation technology, the C90 bend, to BlueScope Steel in Australia to scale the business nationally and internationally. In working with BlueScope, FormFlow found there wasn’t an effective way of measuring the corrugated steel shapes.
“With a corrugated shape, the depth of the corrugations, the spacing of them, and the overall amount of material from one peak to the next is what is important,” he said. “Funnily enough, there wasn’t a widespread sophisticated way of doing this. We now have a smart software which facilitates the use of the laser – we combined a relatively simple product with a user-friendly software so the operator can simply press a button and run the scan.”
Roll forming manufacturers have shown significant interest in the 2D laser system because it enables continuous, real-time quality control. The laser automatically measures the key parameters of the steel and provides the necessary data, something that is currently a manual, time consuming process.
The second outcome of the research project was an Industry 4.0 manufacturing cell capable of producing a corrugated corner bend from a flat sheet of steel. Weiss said having the flexibility to adjust the scope of the project enabled the team to develop completely unexpected, but more effective, solutions.
“Our research still focused on creating a high-volume manufacturing cell, but instead of implementing equipment to monitor and control the bend, we designed a new technology and forming process called the in- phase continuous corner (IPCC),” he said. “IPCC means we no longer need to compensate for differences in steel corrugations or work with fixed lengths. We can instead take a flat steel sheet and form an easy-to-install bend in continuous lengths.”
Within this project, FormFlow supported four internships and have students now employed at the company because of their excellent work.
“It was a beautiful combination,” Weiss said. “We worked with Deakin’s mechatronics department for the laser. We had probably about eight people on this project from various areas all getting to a point where we could test the equipment and optimise it. If you really want to develop something new, working with a university is so useful.”
Dr Matthew Young, Manufacturing Innovation Manager at IMCRC, congratulated FormFlow and Deakin on the successful completion of their research collaboration.
“By starting with the research fundamentals, FormFlow and Deakin were able to justify their non-traditional approach to problem-solving and develop products of significant
benefit to Australia’s sheet metal manufacturing industry,” he said. “Once commercialised, the groundbreaking smart technologies will help standardise and validate suppliers’ material inputs and FormFlow outputs, creating affordable, high-quality products with minimal waste.”
The road to commercialisation is paved with lessons learned and obstacles, but undoubtedly this manufacturing start-up is more than on its way.
“We want to move really quickly, which is sometimes a challenge,” Matt Dingle said. “The exposure from the market has been fantastic, but the next step has been developing a new market, informing the market and finding out the needs of the market to make the product successful.
“What we’ve done is incorporated our products into a whole range of prefabricated buildings so, we’re a builder in our own right now. We’ve decided to tackle the whole value chain because we feel we need to do that to explain to others how to do it. We want to continue to collaborate with others to bring the technology forward together.”

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