Page 26 - MetalForming August 2014

Digital Manufacturing
Impacts Sheet Hydroforming
A revolution is taking place, leveraging several independent technologies to produce advanced metalforming results and change the way companies develop and produce sheetmetal parts. The result: the destruction of old notions of part cost, forming capability and development time.
BY RYAN PENDLETON
It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, and a new sheetmetal part order arrives in your inbox with a delivery timeline of “ASAP.”
You upload the supplied CAD data and material specifications into your forming-simulation software. During the next 2 hr., your engineers develop, simulate and refine the tooling design, flat-pattern design and forming- process variables. To address the ten- dency for the material to tear, they modify a tool radius and identify the ideal pressure for preventing wrinkles. All of this occurs before manufacturing a single tool or cutting a single flat pattern.
By 4:30 p.m. you’re ready to make the tool and cut the engineered blanks. Engineers export the tool design gen-
Ryan Pendleton is sales and marketing manager, Beckwood Press Company, Fenton, MO: 636/343-4100, www.beck- woodpress.com.
Steelville Manufacturing employs this new Triform 24-5BD sheet hydroforming press to form a seven-bend part in less than one-fourth the time it would have taken in a press brake. The press features a 24-in.-dia. forming area with a maximum forming pressure of 5000 PSI.
erated within the simulation software to an inhouse 3D printer. The printer goes to work, building up the tooling layer-by-layer with high-performance material designed to withstand the intense forming pressures associated with sheet hydroforming. The print job continues through the night via lights out manufacturing, and is ready for work by the time you return to the plant the next morning.
Time to load the tool and blank, and then program the forming procedure. You cycle the press with confidence, and the tool and blank designs that were optimized during simulation per- form as planned.
After a fast 8-sec. press cycle, you remove the fully formed part from the press. It’s 9:00 a.m. and you’re ready to begin sending the parts to shipping, and out to your customer.
The collective power of advanced
simulation software, additive-manu- factured (3D-printed) tooling and sheet hydroforming provides the above- noted (and other) competitive advan- tages to metalformers. Alone, the indi- vidual technologies can be powerful tools for any modern metalforming facility. But when used together, the three technologies create an ecosystem that supports rapid part development and inexpensive low- to mid-volume part production (see the accompanying sidebar for a case study examining how one metalformer does just that).
Step 1–3D Forming Simulation
Forming-simulation software has fundamentally altered the engineer- ing process, allowing users to predict a host of real-world scenarios that in turn influence and improve part and die design. The ability to simulate the forming process virtually, with confi-
24 MetalForming/August 2014
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