Papers by Keyword: Abrasive Blasting

Abstract: Many sheet materials do not exhibit constant properties over the sheet thickness. On the one hand, this can be caused by a rolling process with a pass reduction of 1-2%, the so-called skin pass rolling. This is mainly used for deep drawing steel grades to eliminate the pronounced yield strength of the base material. Another possibility is abrasive blasting or shot peening of sheet metal. This causes plastic deformation of the sheet surface and material strengthening. The grading can be used to locally strengthen components or locally adapt the roughness. Since many production processes today are designed numerically, the mapping of such a grading is necessary but currently not implemented in FE code. Aim of this research is, to correlate the material hardness to a plastic pre-strain with a newly developed characterization method. For this purpose, graded material properties are generated by means of abrasive blasting as an example process. The resulitng locally varying work hardening over the sheet thickness is further integrated in finite element analysis by the assignment of a starting condition of a 2d-shell element formulation. With this approach, it is possible to map the graded material properties easily in FE simulations with a very good accuracy.

Abstract: Composite materials, such as CFRP, are hard-to-cut materials but their specific strength is useful. Drill tools are usually used to generate small holes of 1-2 mm diameter, but tool abrasion occurs early, causing problems of processing costs. Comparing other processing methods, it was revealed in the previous report that it was possible to effectively generate large quantities of small size holes using blasting. However, there have been many unknown mechanisms about this blast processing. In the present report, we investigated the material-removing mechanisms of the blast from the viewpoint of the erosion abrasion, considering the most suitable method through changing work materials and processing conditions such as abrasive and pressure.

Abstract: Innovative trends like increasing component functionality, the demand for automotive lightweight constructions and the economic issue to optimize existing process chains, require new ways in manufacturing. Today, the traditional sheet metal and bulk metal forming processes are often reaching their limits if closely-tolerated complex functional components with variants have to be produced. A promising approach is the direct forming of high-precision shapes starting from blanks. Thus, classic sheet metal forming operations, such as deep drawing, are combined with bulk metal forming operations like extrusion of complex variants as for example teeth. This combination of sheet and bulk metal forming operations leads to a side by side situation of different tribological conditions according to the locally varying load situations within the same forming process. This new class of forming processes is defined as sheet-bulk metal forming (SBMF). The tribological conditions in sheet-bulk metal forming processes are of major importance for the process realization, its stability and for the quality of the produced part. The objective of this paper is the investigation of material flow in SBMF in general and the attempt to improve the material flow by local adapted tribological conditions. First the material flow was analyzed by FE-simulation of a model geometry that is typical for SBMF. The investigations with FE-simulation have shown, locally adapted tribological conditions are leading to an improvement in material flow and thus to an increased mould filling. As frictional conditions are directly connected to the topography of workpiece and tool, the modification of the workpiece topography is leading to an alteration in friction values. For the modification of workpiece topography grit blasting was used. The increase in friction of grit blasted surface towards untreated surface was investigates by using the laboratory friction tests. To manufacture specimens with locally adapted topographies for forming tests a masking technique has been developed. The masks are designed after the preliminary findings determined by FE-simulation.

Abstract: This paper introduces a study on a multi-objective optimization problem of abrasive blasting systems. The aim of the study is to find the optimum exchanged diameter of boron carbide nozzles. In the study, the effects of several parameters such as the maximum nozzle diameter, the nozzle wear and the cost components on the optimum initial nozzle diameter were taken into account. From the study, a regression model for determination of the optimum initial diameter of boron carbide nozzles was introduced.

Abstract: This paper presents a new study on profit optimization of abrasive blasting systems. In the study, the effects of many parameters such as the air pressure, the initial nozzle diameter, the cost components and the nozzle wear on the profit rate were investigated. Based on the results of the optimization problem, regression models for determination of the optimal exchanged nozzle diameter in order to get the maximal profit rate were proposed. With “optimal diameter”, both the profit rate and the cleaning time can be reduced significantly.