Manufacturing of Integrated Cooling Channels by Directed Energy Deposition for Hot Stamping Tools with Ball Burnished Surfaces

Hot stamping tools require cooling channels, preferably with a high positioning flexibility. Conventionally, these are machined. This represents a disadvantage because of the limited accessibility for milling tools and the low flexibility. By means of the Directed Energy Deposition (DED) process, a flexible design of the cooling channels is possible. Different geometries of cooling channels can be manufactured by DED in order to control the heat balance in the hot stamping tool. In this context an agreement between the additive producibility and the surface fraction of the cooling channels, which contributes to the effective heat at the tool surface, is important. Experimental and numerical analyses demonstrate that a possible configuration in this field is the drop shaped cooling channel. To reduce the surface roughness after the DED process, the tool surfaces are ball burnished subsequently. The resulting roughness and the waviness of the tool surface are reduced but not leveled completely. Texturing of the surface can be applied to in fluence the material flow in the hot stamping process which is implemented by DED. The combination of the described methods allows for manufacturing hot stamping tools with near-surface cooling channels and a global or local adjustment of the surface properties of the tools. © 2022, The Author(s).