Failure Analysis of Rapid Prototyped Tooling in Sheet Metal Forming—Cylindrical Cup Drawing

Abstract

This paper presents a failure analysis of cylindrical cup drawing dies machined from a polymer composite rapid tooling material. Cup drawing is a complicated process, involving both bending and stretching. In this study, possible die failure modes are identified experimentally. Finite element analyses (FEA) are performed to obtain the stress–strain responses, which are used to determine the dominant failure mode. As cup drawing involves interactions among process parameters, the statistical design of experiments is employed to perform a parametric study. The resulting die failure mode estimation method is verified through experiments.