TOOLING DESIGN ACCOMMODATING SPRINGBACK ERRORS

Tooling design and development for sheet metal forming is an expensive process in terms of both time and current manufacturing cost. In the present work it is shown that Finite Element Analysis can be used in tooling design procedures by accurately predicting and accomodating for errors due to springback in sheet metal forming operations. To design the appropriate tooling, traction distributions on the sheet in the fully loaded deformed state are computed using the Finite Element Method. The calculated tractions are then used to elastically load the desired part shape. The deformed shape is then taken to be the die shape as it now contains the springback error. The traction-based design algorithm is examined for materials covering a range of steel strength and hardening and is found to produce parts with negligible error. The success of the method indicates that it can replace the current hardware steps of trial and error tooling design procedures, thereby greatly reducing the cost of tooling development and the experience required for such development.