An industrial-scale cold forming process highly sensitive to temperature induced frictional start-up effects to validate a physical based friction model

It is widely realized in the metal forming industry that the processes suffer from start-up effects, which can cause products that fall out of their specification limits after a certain period of running. Attempts are made to solve this by modelling the underlying tribological phenomena in order to design robust processes. Another possibility is to adapt the processes to changes of the tribological system through control systems. For both approaches the ability to account for tribological effects in numerical simulations is a crucial requirement. To showcase this, a real-life demonstrator process is built, that is specifically designed to be sensitive to temperature induced frictional effects. This enables the validation of the physical based tribological models on an industrial scale, without the need to add complexity from other research domains in the field of metal forming. After designing the tooling, the process' sensitivity to temperature induced frictional effects is verified by implementing and applying all simulations tools created [1]. The industrial scale demonstrator process is ran, while measuring tool temperature and geometrical product parameters (quality features) in real-time, at different stroke rates until a steady-state temperature is reached. The recorded data sets, combined with the products themselves, show during the full validation that the predictions from the simulations are generally in good agreement with the results from production.