Die Design and Service Life Analysis

Abstract

In metal-forming industries, die performance and service life commit to product quality, time-to-market, and production cost. Die design and manufacturing is thus an important issue in metal-forming product development. Without suitable and efficient die, metal-forming processes would be crippled or rendered totally inefficient. To have a high-quality die with long service life, the die design with low working stress, long service life, and being able to produce high-quality metal-deformed parts is crucial. Therefore, die design and die service life assessment in up-front design stage need to systematically consider different factors, which could interactively affect the performance of die and its service life, and further the quality of the metal-deformed parts using the designed die. In die design and development cycle, the eventual goal of all the design activities is to generate the optimal design with the best parameter configuration. Therefore, the simulation-enabled die design and development paradigm needs to overcome the disadvantages of the traditional die design practice and approaches as they cannot well and accurately predict and evaluate the performance and service life of die in design stage due to the difficulty to fully explore and determine die working stress and its distribution in working condition and lack of efficient methods for die life assessment.