Advanced prediction of tool wear by taking the load history into consideration

A disadvantage of the conventional methods of simulating the wear occurring in deep drawing processes is that the wear coefficient, and thus wear too, is considered to be constant along loading duration, which, in case of deep drawing, corresponds to sliding distance and number of punch strokes. However, in reality, it is a known fact that wear development is not constant over time. In former studies, the authors presented a method, which makes it possible to consider the number of punch strokes in the simulation of wear. Another enhancement of this method is introduced in this paper. It is proposed to consider wear as a function of wear work instead of the number of punch strokes. Using this approach, the wear coefficients are implemented as a function of wear work and fully take into account the load history of the respective node. This enhancement makes it possible to apply the variable wear coefficients to completely different geometries, where one punch stroke involves different sliding distance or pressure values than the experiments with which the wear coefficients were determined. In this study, deep drawing experiments with a cylindrical cup geometry were carried out, in which the characteristic wear coefficient values as well as their gradients along the life cycle were determined. In this case, the die was produced via rapid tooling techniques. The prediction of tool wear is carried out with REDSY, a wear simulation software which was developed at the Institute of Metal Forming and Casting, TU-Muenchen. The wear predictions made by this software are based on the results of a conventional deep drawing simulation. For the wear modelling a modified Archard model was used.