j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 348353

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Tool life prediction for the bolt forming process based on high-cycle fatigue and wear
H.C. Lee a , Y. Lee b , S.Y. Lee c , S. Choi c , D.L. Lee c , Y.T. Im a,
a

National Research Laboratory for Computer Aided Materials Processing, Department of Mechanical Engineering, ME3227, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, 373-1, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea b Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 156-756, Republic of Korea c Wire Rod Research Group, POSCO Technical Research Laboratories, Pohang 790-785, Republic of Korea

a r t i c l e
Keywords: Tool life Wear Fatigue failure

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
In the present investigation an integrated model for predicting tool life in the cold forging process considering the high-cycle fatigue and wear is proposed in terms of mechanical properties of the workpiece. For calculating wear amount during cold forging, Archards wear model was reformulated as an incremental form and implemented into the nite element code. Following a series of FE simulations, empirical equations for estimating the tool life based on wear and fatigue models were obtained. The present results showed that tool life due to high-cycle fatigue failure decreased signicantly as the strength of material increased. Meanwhile tool life caused by wear also decreased as the strength of material decreased but the rate of tool life reduction was relatively small. This implies that tool life should be estimated using the fatigue failure model for cold forging of high strength steels. On the other hand, for cold forging of low strength steels, die life should be evaluated considering wear model as well. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Finite element analysis Bolt forming process

1.

Introduction

Cold forging process forges the workpiece in a die through a series of blows at room temperature and yields products with a shape, copying the inner surface conguration of the die. The strength of the die used in the cold forging process should be much higher than the one of the workpiece such that the die remains in the range of elastic deformation during forging. The service life of tools is generally determined by the number of blows applied to the tool to manufacture the products meeting the dimensional tolerance and without making any cracking in the dies. Thus, it is usually limited by fatigue failure, which causes sudden fracture in the industry during repetition of blows, and by wear, which affects the dimensional tolerance of formed products. Thus the design

engineers in charge of the cold forging process need to establish a reliable model for predicting the tool life. It is, however, difcult to set up a model for predicting the tool life because various process parameters (forging speed, lubrication condition, temperature, etc.) and material parameters (yield strength, strain hardening exponent and hardness) are involved. So far, numerous studies have been made separately on fatigue or wear for tool life estimation. Knoerr et al. (1994) discussed possible causes of fatigue failure of the tool in the cold forging process and found out that fatigue was an important limiting factor for governing the tool life than wear. Asfani (1999) conducted an experiment to determine the die stress at an actual cold heading operation, showing that high-cycle fatigue was the main cause of tool failure. Falk

Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 42 869 3227; fax: +82 42 869 3210. E-mail address: ytim@kaist.ac.kr (Y.T. Im). 0924-0136/$ see front matter 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2007.11.166

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Fig. 1 The schematic diagrams of the die-set and preforming of bolt in a two-stage bolt forming process; (a) rst stage for preforming and (b) second stage for bolt forming.

et al. (1998) found out that Morrows local stress approach based on high-cycle fatigue (Morrow, 1968) was sensible for estimating the tool life. Lee and Chen (2001) obtained the relationship between the hardness of the die material and fatigue life. Recently, Saroosh et al. (2007) applied the high-cycle fatigue theory with Morrows approach for the bolt forming process and suggested an empirical equation for estimating the tool life due to fatigue failure based on workpiece properties. For prediction of the amount of wear, Archard (1953) developed an empirical relation and investigated the inuence of various process parameters on wear. Vardan et al. (1987) and Sobis et al. (1992) estimated the die wear during upsetting and hot forging on the basis of nite element analyses. Lee and Im (1999) implemented Archards wear model into nite element program for calculating wear proles in dies and compared the numerically obtained wear proles to experimental results available in the literature (Vardan et al., 1987). However, it is not easy to nd the research accounting for the effect of fatigue and wear at the same time in predicting the tool life for the cold forging. In this study, an integrated model for predicting the tool life in a two-stage bolt forming process was investigated. The proposed model took into account wear and high-cycle fatigue fracture of the tool at the same time since the locations for the fatigue and wear failure were different as near OB and OA in the bolt forming as shown in Fig. 1 according to the previous studies (Falk et al., 1998; Saroosh et al., 2007; Lee and Im, 1999). To establish the model, a series of nite element analyses of cold forging was carried out while material properties of the workpiece such as strength coefcient and strain hardening exponent were varied. Based on this approach an

empirical equation predicting the tool life depending on the wear amount was determined in terms of strength coefcient and strain hardening exponent. Finally, the proposed model was applied for predicting the tool life for four different workpiece materials of AISI 1045, 4135, 51B20, 10B22 for a given tolerable amount of wear. The chemical composition and material property of the workpiece material are given in Table 1.

2.

Bolt forming process

Fig. 1 shows the geometry of die insert and preform of the workpiece in a two-stage bolt forming process. Fig. 1(a) illustrates an initially straight bar with the diameter of 9 mm was transformed into a tapered shape at the rst preforming stage. This preformed shape was moved to the second stage and then forged to make a nal bolt head as shown in Fig. 1(b). Usually, signicant amount of wear has been observed at area, OA in the second stage of deformation. This was because relative velocity between the tool and workpiece becomes larger at this area OA due to its geometry. Meanwhile, the amount of wear at the area OB was smaller than that at the area OA . It has been observed that fatigue failure was dominant at area OB due to high normal pressure in this area. Area OB was the region where the bolt head was formed and subsequently higher stresses were generated by forming load. Thus, it was found out that wear behavior at areas OA and OB and fatigue failure at the area OB should be considered simultaneously to determine the tool life during the bolt forming process.

Table 1 Chemical composition and mechanical property of the workpiece materials Materials Mechanical property K
AISI 1045 AISI 4135 AISI 51B20 AISI 10B22 900 896 813 779

Chemical composition C
0.430.50 0.330.38 0.170.22 0.180.23

n
0.084 0.109 0.129 0.104

Cr
0.81.1 0.70.9

Mn
0.600.90 0.70.9 0.751.00 0.701.00

Mo
0.150.25

P
Max 0.04 Max 0.035 Max 0.035 Max 0.03

S
Max 0.05 Max 0.04 Max 0.04 Max 0.035

Si
0.150.35 0.150.30 0.150.30

B
0.00050.003 0.00050.003

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Fig. 2 Wear depth depending on (a) the strength coefcient and (b) strain hardening exponent of the workpiece at the area OA and OB , as introduced in Fig. 1.

3.
3.1.

Model for predicting tool life

Fatigue failure model

material of AISI 4340 were assumed to be 105 and 60 HRC, respectively. The differentials, dV, dp and dL in Eq. (2) can be expressed as follows: dV = dZ dA, dp =
n

For the fatigue failure model, the following empirical equation determined by Saroosh et al. (2007) was adopted in the present investigation. 2.5K + Kn 1482.8 + 499.3 2.3K 0.9Kn
1/b

dA,

dL = u dt

(3)

Nf = 0.5
f f

, (1)

= 33, 415, b = 0.289

Here, dZ is the depth of wear, dA the contact area at the interface of the workpiece at dies, dL the sliding length, u the relative sliding velocity and dt is the sliding time. Substituting Eq. (3) into Eq. (2) and dividing both sides by dA, Eq. (2) yields
t n (r, t)u(r, t)

Here, f , b, K, n and Nf are the fatigue strength coefcient, fatigue strength exponent, strength coefcient, strain hardening exponent of the material and number of lifecycles in that order.

Z(r) = k
0

dt

(4)

3.2.

Wear model

Incremental form of Archards wear model was implemented into CAMPform-2D (Kwak et al., 2000) as follows: dV = k dp dL H (2)

after integration with respect to time, where r and t represent position and time parameters, respectively. Since the wear parameters, n and u, were obtained from the rigidthermo-viscoplastic nite-element analysis at discretized nodes on the die surface, Eq. (4) can be discretized into
M N

Zi = k
j=1 i=1

n (r, t)}ij {u(r, t)}ij

(5)

where V is the wear volume, H the hardness of the die material, p the normal pressure at the interface of the workpiece and dies, L the slip length and k is the wear coefcient. In the present investigation, k and H of the die

Here, t is the time step, M the total number of time steps and N indicates the total number of nodes at the workpiece and dies interface. In order to calculate the normal stress and

Fig. 3 Wear depth depending on (a) the strength coefcient and (b) strain hardening exponent of the workpiece at the area OA .

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Fig. 4 Wear depth depending on (a) the strength coefcient and (b) strain hardening exponent of the workpiece at the area OB .

the relative velocity at the workpiece and dies interface, the contact data was transferred from the surface of the workpiece to the surface of the dies. To investigate the effect of material properties of the workpiece on the amount of wear at the area OA and OB , the material properties for four different materials in Table 1 were used.

4.

Results and discussion

the area OB . The relationship between the wear depth and strength coefcient was also in linear but the wear depth at the area OB was slightly different compared with that at the area OA . The wear depth at the area OB was exponentially decreased according to the strain hardening exponent of the material and remained almost constant for the strain hardening exponent higher than 0.18. Similar to the case for OA , an empirical equation for computing the wear depth at the area OB (DB ) can be obtained as DB = K{50.35 e(n/0.0040) + 3.49 107 e(n/0.17) + 6.73 108 } (7) The wear depths calculated by DA and DB are just for the single blow. In the present study it was assumed that the same amount of wear occurs for every blow. Therefore, wear depth can be linearly accumulated to the given wear tolerance for calculating the wear life. To determine the service life of the tool, the wear tolerance was chosen to be 0.4 mm. According to the industrial data, tool life for the bolt forming was varied from 100,000 to 500,000 blows depending on the workpiece material. Therefore, a correction coefcient C of 0.0033 was introduced to calibrate the difference between FE

In Fig. 2, variations of the wear depth at the area OA and OB are plotted against the strength coefcient and strain hardening exponent of the material. By increasing the strength coefcient, the wear depth decreased at the area OA and increased at the area OB . For the case of AISI 4135, the area for maximum wear depth was located at the area OB . Contrary to this result, it was hard to determine any correlation between the wear depth and the strain hardening exponent of the material as shown in Fig. 2(b). In order to investigate the relationship between the wear depth and material properties further, a series of material properties such as strength coefcient of 600, 800, 1000 and 1200 MPa and strain hardening exponent of 0.08, 0.10, 0.12, 0.14, 0.16, 0.18 and 0.2 was investigated by numerical simulations. In Fig. 3, the variations of the wear depth at the area OA are plotted against the strength coefcient and strain hardening exponent of the material. In this gure the relationship between the wear depth and strength coefcient was almost in linear. However, wear depth was a non-linear function of the strain hardening exponent. In Fig. 3(b) wear depth reached at maximum when strain hardening exponent was about 0.14, but wear depth was reduced as the strain hardening exponent increased further. Using a curve tting, an empirical equation for predicting the wear depth at the area OA (DA ) in terms of the strength coefcient K and strain hardening exponent n of the material was obtained as follows: DA = K(1.30 105 4.14 104 n + 0.00478n2 0.0232n3 + 0.0403n4 ) (6)

Fig. 4 shows the wear depth as a function of the strength coefcient and strain hardening exponent of the material at

Fig. 5 Integrated model for predicting tool life in the cold forging process.

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Table 2 Tool life calculated from integrated model using strength coefcient and strain hardening exponent Materials
AISI 4135 AISI 1045 AISI 51B20 AISI 10B22

K (MPa)
900 896 813 779

n
0.084 0.109 0.129 0.104

DA (nm)
0.754 1.060 1.470 0.799

DB (nm)
0.957 0.749 0.625 0.666

NW (103 )
418 377 272 500

Nf (103 )
133 102 321 557

Tool life (103 )

133 102 272 500

Fig. 6 Tool life depending on (a) the strength coefcient and (b) strain hardening exponent of the material.

analysis results and the maximum number of blows calculated for the materials investigated. Fig. 5 shows a ow chart of the integrated model for predicting the tool life in terms of mechanical properties of the workpiece. Once the mechanical properties are known in terms of K and n, the wear depth at the area OA and OB can be calculated based on the results obtained. The maximum values of wear depth at both areas will determine the wear life by dividing the wear tolerance (0.4 mm) with its value. Then, the tool life based on the fatigue model can be calculated. Finally, the tool life will be determined by choosing the minimum value between the wear life Nw and fatigue life Nf . Using the integrated model proposed in this study, the service life of tools was calculated for four different workpiece materials (AISI 4135, AISI 1045, AISI 51B20, AISI 10B22) by following the ow chart introduced in Fig. 5. The predicted wear depth at each area OA or OB , service life for fatigue failure (Nf ), and wear (NW ) are listed in Table 2. According to this table, the tool life for the stronger material was governed by the high-cycle fatigue as expected. But the amount of wear accumulated should be considered to determine the tool life for the softer material as well. In Fig. 6, the number of life cycles based on fatigue failure and wear models developed under the present investigation condition is plotted in terms of the strength coefcient and strain hardening exponent of the material. Fig. 6(a) shows that for higher values of the strength coefcient the tool life was dependent on the high-cycle fatigue whilst for lower values of the strength coefcient the amount of wear should be checked for determining the tool life. The tool life obtained from the high-cycle fatigue model decreased as the increase of the strain hardening exponent for the same strength coefcient of the material according to Fig. 6(b). But the wear model predicted local maximum and minimum of the tool life depending on the strain hardening coefcient in the same gure.

5.

Conclusions

An integrated model for predicting the tool life as a function of mechanical properties of the workpiece in the cold forging process is suggested in the present work. The integrated model was determined based on assumption that the service life of tool can be determined by either high-cycle fatigue failure or total wear amount at certain areas. According to the empirical models developed the tool life can easily be determined in terms of the mechanical properties of the strength coefcient and hardening coefcient of the material. For the softer material, the amount of wear accumulated should be considered to determine the tool life whilst the high-cycle fatigue governed the tool life for the stronger material. For the same strength coefcient of the material the high-cycle fatigue tool life decreased as the strain hardening coefcient increased. However, the total amount of wear had local maximum and minimum values depending on the strain hardening exponent. The current approach will be very useful to estimate the tool life and select the tool material in the related industry.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) through the National Research Lab. Program funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (No. R0A-2006-000-10240-0)

references

Archard, J.F., 1953. Contacts and rubbing of at surfaces. J. Appl. Phys. 24, 981988. Asfani, N., 1999. On tool stresses in cold heading of fasteners. Eng. Failure Anal. 6, 321325.

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Falk, B., Engel, U., Geiger, M., 1998. Estimation of tool life in bulk metal forming based on different failure concepts. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 8081, 602607. Knoerr, M., Lange, K., Altan, T., 1994. Fatigue failure of cold forging tooling: causes and possible solution through fatigue analysis. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 46, 5771. Kwak, D.Y., Cheon, J.S., Kim, S.Y., Lee, G.A., Im, Y.T., 2000. Development of PC-based simulation system for metal forming. Trans. Mater. Process. 9, 233241. Lee, Y.C., Chen, F.K., 2001. Fatigue life of cold-forging dies with various values of hardness. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 113, 539543. Lee, G.A., Im, Y.T., 1999. Finite-element investigation of the wear and elastic deformation of dies in metal forming. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 8990, 123127.

Morrow, J., 1968. Fatigue Design Handbook Advances in Engineering, vol. 4. Society of Automotive Engineers, Warrendale, PA, pp. 2129. Saroosh, M.A., Lee, H.C., Im, Y.T., Choi, S.W., Lee, D.L., 2007. High-cycle fatigue life prediction of cold forging tools based on workpiece material property. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 191, 178181. Sobis, T., Engel, U., Geiger, M., 1992. A theoretical study on wear simulation in metal forming process. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 34, 233240. Vardan, O.C., Bagchi, A., Altan, T., 1987. Investigation of die wear in upsetting using the FEM code ALPID. In: Proceeding of NAMRC-XV, p. 386.