Design of brass alloy drawing process using Taguchi method

In wire drawing processes, many factors must be controlled to obtain the required plastic strain and desired tolerance values. The major factors include the area reduction, the lubricant, the drawing speed, and the die angle. This paper employs the rigid-plastic finite element (FE) DEFORM (TM) 2D software to investigate the plastic deformation behavior of brass alloy (CuZn37) wire as it is drawn through a conical die. Under various drawing conditions, the FE analysis investigates the damage factor distribution, the effective stress-strain distribution, the die load and the maximum principal stress in the wire. The relative influences of the semi-angle of the conical die, the friction factors, the length of the bearing part of the die and the brass alloy temperature are systematically examined. Additionally, the Taguchi method is employed to optimize the wire drawing process parameters. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of this robust design methodology in optimizing the drawing process of the current CuZn37 brass alloy. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.