Wear characteristics of the tool in the cold stamping process of ultra high strength steel sheets by establishing a novel wear test method based on the progressive die

Demands for lightweighting and crashworthiness of the vehicle body have increased. For this purpose, advanced high strength steel to the automobile body was regarded as a solution with respect to manufacturing cost and impact energy absorption. However, increasing the strength of the automotive steel sheet lead to a diversity of problems caused by the tool wear due to higher forming load than that of commonly used steel sheets. Hence, systematic wear experiment and evaluation methods are required to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the tool wear amount in the sheet metal forming process. In this study, a methodology is proposed to quantitatively evaluate the wear of sheet metal forming tool based on the experimental results. In order to carry out a systematic wear test and save the time and cost, the progressive die set was designed to be suitable for wear test. The designed testing machine can simultaneously test four types of punches made under various tooling conditions such as materials, shapes, and coatings. Through the measurement of the wear depth, roughness, and surface imaging of the punch and product roughness, which represent the wear characteristics, quantitative evaluation methods for tool wear in the sheet metal forming process are established. By referring to the wear test results, it is confirmed that it is appropriate to analyze the reasonable tool wear characteristics by using the proposed methodology for quantifying the tool wear in the sheet metal forming process.