Process Monitoring And Real Time Algorithmic For Hot Stamping Lines

Abstract

The Hot Stamping Process is a well-known manufacturing technology for safety and light weight parts in automotive applications. Several process routes and windows are defined in the past years including the virtual modeling. Nevertheless, deviations from ideal process conditions can be observed very often in serial production. This can be a result of an inconstant heating process, hydraulic defects in the cooling system or uneven tool wear, just to name a few possibilities. To improve the production safety this paper shows the development of a real time Process Monitoring system which is fully connected to the production system. The system is gathering data from the furnace, press, automation components, the thermographic cameras and other sensors to calculate thermal- and work balances during the production in real time. After a plausibility check of the data a feasible range of values can be defined. The preprocessed data is stored in a long term database for quality assurance and is a basis further analysis. The gained information and values can be used for a better definition of the boundary conditions and their deviations for virtual modeling as well as for predictive modeling to see upcoming malfunctions or failure in advance. With this valuable information countermeasures during production can be scheduled before sudden machine downtime. This paper also shows how this process information can be linked with hot stamped part identities to achieve tracking and tracing which will be a new standard for the hot forming technology.