Failure analysis of rapid prototyped tooling in sheet metal forming - Cylindrical cup drawing

Abstract

This paper presents a failure analysis of cylindrical cup drawing dies machined from a polymer composite rapid tooling material. Cup drawing is a complicated process, involving both bending and stretching. In this study, possible die failure modes are identified experimentally. Finite element analyses (FEA) are performed to obtain the stress-strain responses, which are used to determine the dominant failure mode. As cup drawing involves interactions among process parameters, the statistical design of experiments is employed to perform a parametric study. The resulting die failure mode estimation method is verified through experiments.