Alternative heating - press hardening - high speed impact cutting - energyefficient prozess chain for uhss

In sheet metal forming cutting technologies are the most important procedures, because every single component has to be cut minimum once. Increasing standards in terms of safety and crash performance in the automotive industries leads to material toughness as well as more complex part geometries. Most of these parts are made by press-hardening. As a pre-process a new and innovative contact heating devise were developed. To post-process this ultra high strength steels (UHSS) common shear cutting technologies, like shearing or fine blanking, are not suitable any more. Production processes by laser trimming are still state of the art in this field of industries. But this is suboptimal in terms of time-, material- and energy-efficiency. Substitution of these laser procedures by economical cutting technologies is essential more than ever. The innovative High Speed Impact Cutting (HSIC), with cutting velocities up to 10 m/s, could be an alternative to process these UHSS. Advantages of the HSIC are the fine grained cutting surface, which can be directly used as a function surface and the oil free cut. Detailed pre-investigations to process UHSS by HSIC were made. It is shown how process parameters like die clearance, cutting velocity, suitable tool materials and design are determined. Based on this knowledge, the applicability of HSIC of directly, inline press-hardened materials is shown with the help of a crash relevant serial component of a car B-pillar. Next to an improved cutting quality, a significant shortened process time were indicated by using the new HSIC technology and machinery (laser process time: 1:20 min vs: HSIC process time: 20 ms) [1]. It is scientifically shown how it is possible to reach a significant increase in productivity by developing and using innovative contact heating and cutting technologies. This leads to huge saving effects in terms of energy, time as well as material.