| Popis: |
Today’s forming technology faces the challenge that the variety and large quantity of new materials require the use of high and ultra-high strength materials to save resources during the service life of products. To serve these requirements, the tool and mould making industry relies on cemented carbide tools for mass forming processes, used, for example, in the newly developing e-mobility branch and in the lightweight design of machine parts. Recent studies have evaluated the use of high strength forming tools made of cemented carbide, and it is clear that these tools are not yet available to a broad field of industrial users. When it comes to high-strength forming tools, the process chain does not allow for effective tool making such as would achieve quick success and a short time-to-market. Due to time and cost pressures, there is increasing demand for high strength forming tools especially from small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), but the material suppliers of cemented carbide tools can only provide pre-shaped blanks in specific sizes and geometries. In the current process chain, these blanks must be processed in several onerous steps until the desired geometry and surface, as well as the material requirements are met. Most of the necessary process steps require both expensive equipment and, due to the high hardness, a considerable amount of time and knowledge. This project aims to shorten the process chain for the tool and mould making of cemented carbide tools, the material properties of which are adapted to their intended use during the manufacturing process. The goal is to make tools that have a longer tool life, and which can produce a larger number of parts before they fail. On the one hand, these goals can be achieved by a mechanical treatment (machine hammer peening, MHP) of the raw material (powder) during the near-net-shape blank fabrication process, followed by hard milling and grinding processes, as well as machine-assisted surface finishing. On the other hand, MHP is used to build up blanks by means of layer-by-layer compaction. Similarly, Material Extrusion AM (MEAM, an FFF-based process) is used to additively produce a green body for subsequent sintering of the cemented carbide. As AM processes, these methods will greatly expand the scope for design and offer high flexibility for small and medium series. Combined with the material classification, great potentials can be leveraged. Especially SMEs will benefit from such modified process chains because of the use of lower-cost machines and better tool availability, enabling them to compete with larger enterprises in the tool and mould making sector. The achievements of this project can easily be exploited since several steps of the new process chain are already in use at an industrial level. Up to now, there has been no research in the field of pre-compressed cemented carbide tools, and all the companies participating in this project have a great need of reliable data in this field of mechanical engineering. Therefore, the project consortium consists of the German Cold Forging Group as project leader, the Institute PtU of the Technical University of Darmstadt, the Institutes wbk/IAM-WK of the KIT in Karlsruhe, the research foundation ecoplus, RHP and the IFT of TU Wien from Austria. All the participants have a high reputation in their field of research and are known for their ability to carry out a CORNET project together. |
