Page 47 - MetalForming April 2016

develop a forming process. From there, Walker’s design department develops a tool around the surfaces developed. The teams then work back and forth throughout the design process.
“Sometimes when the projects get to tool design,” Mason says, “we’ll find that an idea we had is not always fea- sible, so we will modify the concept to create a workable tooling and manu- facturing environment For some of our more complex parts we use AutForm’s Die Designer software to quickly exper- iment with different tips, draw depths, binder shapes and addendums to cre- ate feasible processes.
With decades now under its belt, simulation software has evolved to gain a whole new level of trust with its users, and that is especially true for Mason and his trust in AutoForm.
“If there’s an issue in simulation, there definitely is an issue on the shop floor,” he says. “Our customers, inter- nally and externally, depend on us to work the bugs out before we ship the tools to the floor. If we don’t have a green simulation (that is, a very good process worked out in simulation), we do not move ahead with the die-build process until it is cured.”
With the software’s speed, Mason’s team can afford to be thorough and creative without sacrificing lead time. A recent case in point: A challenging high-strength, low-alloy-steel cross- member for an OEM pickup truck of high-strength low-alloy steel, which underwent dozens of iterations to arrive at an acceptable green process.
Simulation Tackles Increasing Springback Challenges
Working with higher-strength mate- rials on projects such as this has become the norm at Walker, where more and more of these materials find their way into automotive and even appliance parts. For that reason, Mason and Walk- er make extensive use of AutoForm’s springback-compensation module, Aut- oForm-CompensatorPlus. The mod- ule allows users to automatically mod- ify tooling surfaces based on precise springback calculation. Engineers can
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define compensation regions, which the software automatically adjusts using the springback results, with that compensated geometry then used for rapid and accurate tooling validation. Either the entire tooling surface or selected regions of a die face may be defined and modified. Defining these different regions allows for systematic compensation control, according to AutoForm officials, because compen-
sated tooling geometry is automatical- ly used as input for the next simulation. For example, Walker recently took on an automotive OEM project using DP 980, where springback on existing tooling was “way out of control,” says
Mason.
“We dropped the project into Auto-
Form and modified the process to develop the tip and addendums to bet- ter attack springback. We saw a big
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