Omni-Lite Industries is an advanced material company. They recently designed a new part that was exhibiting a unique material flow. The part was cold formed out of 1100 aluminum material.
The initial tool design was completed and reviewed using the Simufact.forming simulation. Upon initial review, everything seemed to be acceptable, with the exception of the volume of material in the flange of the part. The second station trap extrusion die radius was then reduced in order to accommodate the material volume requirements.
The updated die geometry was not re-evaluated with Simufact.forming, because it was expected that this small change would not have a major impact on the part.
The tooling was produced to this revision, which produced a rejected sequence. There was a material flow issue that generated a void on the top of the flange, and this was not acceptable to the customer.
At this time, the simulation was re-run with the reduced second station radius. This simulation duplicated the physical results from the cold forming process. A revision was then made to the diameter of the raw material to change the reduction of cross section area where the round material is trap extruded into the hex geometry. The new tooling was produced after the design revision validated by simulation. As a result the parts were created without material void, and approved by the customer for full production.
Finally, Omni-Lite concluded that there is a very accurate correlation between the software prediction of material flow and the real-world results from the heading tooling. This proves evidence that simulation is a very necessary tool to use for cold forming design in order to reduce development costs and product development lead time.
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