Improvement of stamping tools design process for industrial use

Stamping is a metal forming process that utilizes the plastic deformation property of material. The process is composed of flat sheet metal placed into a stamping press, where a stamping tool (die) is positioned, it is then formed by the surfaces of the tooling. Metal stamping process has been applied in a wide variety of industries such as aerospace, automotive, construction… In a stamping tool, a punch and a die are used to form or cut a metal sheet. These two parts define the shape of the final product. However, a complete stamping tool is made of more than a dozen of different components. Each component has a specific utility and must follow the rules of the stamping tool design. Our first goal in this project is to improve the stamping tool designing process by reducing the designing time as well as optimizing the model so as to lessen the material needed for each tooling.  The Knowledgeware module of CATIA has offered many possibilities to simplify the design process of products. The module itself is a combination of the knowledge we have in the field and programming notions to realize a smart design of stamping tools.  The design of the tooling is directly dependent on the manufacturing part. The stamping tool can have several configurations which depend on the use of the tooling. The choice of the configuration impact the way the parameters are depending to the others. These differences can be on the definition of the equations or in the positioning / existence of some parts. In this project, we consider five configurations for a stamping tool: Drawing, Bending, Blanking, Trimming, and Piercing. We also have to consider that it is possible to combine two or three configurations in the same tooling. The parameters of the tooling are connected together by rule sets, design tables, reactions and checks. These are the programming tool provided by the software and they are used with the CATIA optimization tool to achieve the final stamping tool design. After the realization of the tooling, our second milestone is to put the design into ABAQUS to simulate the stamping process so as to be able to predict any defects that might happen in the final product and to propose changes to further optimize the tooling. The main factors to have a good simulation result is to determine and find all the real-life elements that are modifiable in a stamping process, such as, elastic properties (Young’s modulus, Poisson’s ratio) and plastic properties (Stress-strain diagrams) of the material in use, as well as holding load, pressing load, punch velocity, friction coefficient between the tooling and the sheet metal… We also used different simulating procedure (Static, general/Dynamic, explicit) and different mesh refinement methods to compare the results to have the correct final assessment.