TOOLING

IN-HOUSE TOOLING CAPABILITY

To ensure manufacture cost reduction, quality consistency, and slow but sure business growth, a division to design and fabricate tools was implemented in 2002 with Solid Edge CAD to safeguard our field perfection in cold forming. To that avail, the infinite pursuit for Tool Lifetime Optimization has since become an endless curriculum to Delteks.

Various states of complex stress-strain are simultaneously present when cold forming tools are cyclically loaded. To deal with this unbeatable reality, our targeted goals are two-fold.

(1) In exploring optimum marginal efficiency brought by increase in pre-stressing of dies (i.e. tool material selection) and stiffness of tool assembly (i.e. heat treatment of tools), a positive correlation is there between both increases and tool life.

(2) In handling with die geometry itself, a process simulation module capable of calculating multi-axial damage parameters shall be indispensably required.

There are quite a few commercial FEM packages in the market. Each of them is impressive for their disciplinary specialization. But the only fly in the ointment has been none of them offer the possibility to calculate multi-axial damage parameters to the tool materials applied, making predictions of expected tool life virtually impossible.

Nevertheless, we are about an inch close to building a simple but highly referable FEM simulation module for the estimation of tool life and location of cracks. TLOS (Tool Life Optimization Simulation), as we plan to call it, will carry manufacturing at Delteks to next level of optimum tool lifetime as well as lowest machine shutdown frequency.