The effect of heating temperature and methods towards the formability of deep drawn square metal cup

Abstract

Deep drawing operation is one of the most crucial sheet metal forming processes in industrial applications, but it usually requires expensive multi-step production processes, which is necessary in order to produce complex parts. On top of that, room temperature may cause poor formability or failure due to mechanical properties of the material. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of heating temperature and the most efficient heating position to perform warm square deep drawing operation without failure. Besides that, this study also aims to compare the thickness distribution of drawn cup’s profile obtained from experiment and finite element analysis. A warm formability study of aluminium, mild steel and stainless steel sheet metals are tested by deep drawing experimental methods. The Taguchi approach, which applies L9 orthogonal array, is used to conduct experiments. Different sizes of square blanks are deep drawn at room temperature, 100°C, 150°C and 200°C using three heating techniques, which are heating die only, heating punch only and heating both the die and punch. The results show that warm deep drawing process has more uniform thickness distribution within the square cup profile compared to room temperature condition. Furthermore, maximum thinning condition at the punch corner is noticeably reduced. Lower and upper limit of heating temperature exists, as there is a low and high-temperature failure. Combination of stainless steel with 45 mm blank size, heating temperature of 150°C and die heating technique is optimal in order to obtain uniform thickness distribution in square cup deep drawing process.