Determination of die and process parameters of hydromechanical deep drawing using analogy method

In this study, in order to meet the demand for fast and economical production of sheet metal products, the design and manufacture of hydroforming dies have been carried out in order to reduce the number of operations in production of teapot, which is produced with many operations by conventional deep drawing. Integrated adaptive FEA and fuzzy logic control algorithm were used for determine die and process parameters. Prior to the manufacturing of large sized and therefore costly 1:1 scale dies required for the production of industrial products, the validity of the die and process parameters determined by the laboratory press with low cost 1:4 scale dies in the Hydromechanical Deep Drawing (HDD) method was investigated using 1:1 scale dies by means of the analogy method. To achieve this goal, an industrial sheet hydroforming press with capacity of 100 MPa fluid pressure and 10000 kN was used. At the end of the laboratory works, HDD was applied with 1:1 scale dies using the die and process parameters obtained from 1:4 scale dies. The teapot, which can be formed in four stages with conventional drawing, could be successfully produced in only one stage with HDD. So, before the manufacturing of the 1:1 scale dies required for the production of the industrial product, a significant contribution has been made by determination of sealing system and process parameters using 1:4 scale model dies in accordance with the simulation rules. The teapot could be produced in 50 seconds with HDD. In this case, the production rate was increased by about 20% with conventional deep drawing process. It was seen that the thickness distribution of the teapot produced with HDD was more uniform than that produced with deep drawing process and that the tolerances in the parts produced by conventional deep drawing process were approximately the same as those obtained with HDD.