Research on the effect of ultrasonic vibration on the roll-over during the fine blanking process

Abstract

Fine blanking process as an advanced sheet metal cutting process has been widely used in industry. However, the roll-over of the parts fabricated by this process weakens the performance. For some parts, i.e. gear, the size of the roll-over should be very small in some situation. Therefore, a lot of efforts have been made to reduce the roll-over size or even eliminate the roll-over. Since the high frequency vibration can greatly change the metal flow, the ultrasonic vibration was applied into the fine blanking process to eliminate the roll-over in this paper. A finite element model was created to investigate the roll-over forming mechanism in the ultrasonic vibration assisted fine blanking process. The forming force, metal flow and mean stress were analyzed and compared with the conventional fine blanking process, and the roll-over size variation mechanism of the ultrasonic vibration assisted fine blanking process was revealed. An experiment of ultrasonic vibration assisted fine blanking has been carried out in this paper, and the roll-over size variation during the conventional and ultrasonic vibration assisted fine blanking process were compared. The results show that the experiment result has a good agreement with that of the finite element simulation. From this research, it can get that the ultrasonic vibration can greatly reduce the roll-over size, and it has a promising future to be used in the fine blanking process.