High-feed milling of tailored surfaces for sheet-bulk metal forming tools

The increasingly investigated and applied production process sheet-bulk metal forming (SBMF) has novel requirements for the forming tools, e.g., the need of an adaptive material flow at different areas of the tool for an adequate form filling. One new method to realize different, defined tribological conditions are tailored surfaces (TS). During the design of forming tools, it is imperative to have profound knowledge about the tribology between the tool and the workpiece. This article introduces structuring with high-feed milling tools as one possibility for influencing the material flow during forming processes and presents a ring-compression test for the quantification of the tribological conditions, which is adapted for SBMF. On the basis of various machined structures, surface parameters are analyzed to identify a correlation with the friction coefficient to gain knowledge about the mechanisms of TS and to be able to choose structures according to the needs of SBMF processes. © 2014, German Academic Society for Production Engineering (WGP).