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Tests to cut die design costs developed by NIST

Manufacturing News Center

A one-of-kind test equipment is being developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers to stamp out costly, delay-causing errors in the design of dies used to make sheet metal parts ranging from car hoods to airplane wings to pots, pans, and cans.

The U.S. auto industry alone is estimated to spend more than $700 million a year on designing, testing, and correcting new dies for its latest models, each contains about 300 stamped parts shaped by dies and presses. About half of the total goes to remedying unanticipated errors-manifested as wrinkles, splits, excessive thinning, or other defects.

By fitting NIST's metal-stamping test station with an X-ray stress measurement system, NIST's materials scientists now can make detailed maps of stresses and strains as sheets of steel and other metals are punched, stretched, or otherwise shaped. The system can measure stress and strain behavior in many different directions while the sheet is being stretched in two directions simultaneously, a condition most commonly seen in forming operations.

Current methods extrapolate from strain measurements taken from tests that stretch the sheet in only one direction. As a consequence, newly designed dies often must undergo successive rounds of refinement to correct for these simplifications in computer models.

U.S. automakers and producers of steel, aluminum, and other metals, including developmental ones, are supplying the NIST team with samples for testing and evaluation. The project will result in a novel database of materials' properties that designers can feed into computer models to predict whether would-be dies can form particular metals into specified shapes, within tolerances.

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Source: Tooling & Production
Copyright Nelson Publishing Dec 2003

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