Page 33 - Metallforming Magazine December 2020

Using
... to navigate the perfect storm of die development: increased part complexity, stronger steels and compressed customer timelines.
BY BRAD F. KUVIN, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Facing the “perfect storm” of die design and development—dra- matic increases in stamped-part complexity along with compressed cus- tomer timelines—led the management team at 3-Dimensional Services Group, in 2015, to invest in new simulation software. The company now regularly calls on the software to help manage blank development, evaluate stamped- part and process feasibility, and gen- erate and simulate alternative die-face designs.
“Simulations are critical now,” shares Daniel Smith, a salesman for 3- Dimensional Services Group, a diver- sified group of companies offering a multitude of capabilities including CNC machining, stamping, laser cutting and robotic welding, plastic injection mold- ing, welding, waterjet cutting, hydro- forming, and prototyping. “We use the
software (a trio of modules from Aut- oForm) to efficiently validate tooling designs prior to putting die blocks into a CNC machine. The ability to validate our blank and die designs saves us countless hours of shop time, much of which would typically consume costly overtime hours, and cuts way down on material waste.”
Streamlining Tryout
3-Dimensional Services Group oper- ates out of four facilities and a com- bined 350,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space housing nearly 400 employees. Die development occurs at its head- quarters facility in Rochester Hills, MI, and at its Urgent Design & Manufac- turing facility in Lapeer, MI. While it serves a host of end-use industries including appliance, aerospace and defense, automotive is its largest mar- ket, keeping it busy developing com- ponents and assemblies for body-in- white structures, seating and chassis systems, and the like. The company operates some 160 presses, maxing out at 5000-ton capacity; it has 14 presses 1000 tons and up.
“We don’t develop or run any pro- gressive dies here, it’s all hand-transfer work,” says Smith. “If a part requires four or five hits, that means designing and developing four or five separate
dies. The more difficult the job— whether due to material type or part complexity—the more material, and time, we would waste in tryout.”
Eliminating that waste led the firm to purchase five seats of AutoForm. “I’m told we have more solvers than some of the OEMs,” Smith says. Its team of die designers use three Auto- Form modules: StampingAdvisor, DieDesigner and Compensator.
“We use them constantly,” says Primo Tongko III, CAD room senior tool-design leader. “Before AutoForm, everything was done manually. Merely developing a blank could take weeks and consume a lot of material. Now, every part that comes in we run through AutoForm.”
Evaluating Part
and Process Feasibility
AutoForm-StampingAdvisor enables designers at 3-Dimensional Services Group to quickly evaluate part and process feasibility, and determine blank shape, material utilization and blank cost. It identifies any risk of excess thinning or splitting during stamping, and the potential for wrinkling.
“We use the software for early fea- sibility evaluations based on part geometry,” says Tongko. “I can modify the part design and within minutes the
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Simulation Software