Application of fine blanking to the manufacture of a sprocket with stainless steel sheet

Wire cutting(EDM) or blanking is used to made workpieces from sheet metal. Wire EDM provides a relatively simple method for making holes of any desired cross section in material. But EDM requires a lot of working time and the high unit cost of production. In conventional blanking, for the production of precision devices or assemblies, it is always necessary that at least two, but generally more, secondary operations are required per piece part. Using the fine blanking process, a precise finished part with inner and outer forms clearly sheared over the whole material thickness are produced in one single operation. In this study an attempt is made to manufacture a sprocket with fine blanking process. The sprocket is parts for the tape feeder of surface mount system in electronic parts. First, a change of the existing design is made in a sprocket. The materials selected are three kinds of stainless steel, SUS304, SUS316 and SUS430. And the mechanical properties are investigated through the tensile test. After fine blanking, hardness and precision are examined with hardness test and 3-dimensional coordinate measuring for samples. The results of investigations of fine-blanking process with the help of FEM code, DEFORM 2D, are presented. For the simulation, SUS304 and SUS316 are used as materials. The damage model of Cockroft and Latham is used to calculate damage. Die-roll height, die-roll width, burnish zone and fracture zone from the fine blanking simulation are investigated in comparison with them of samples. And the applied force at each part of fine-blanking die is estimated with load-stroke diagram.