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2006
Conference Paper
Titel
A production-oriented approach in electromagnetic forming of metal sheets
Abstract
Sheet metal forming shows tendencies to a smaller number of parts per unit. Especially demands of modern lightweight design seems to be hard to satisfy by stretching conventional production methods. Thus it is necessary to find new approaches. Adapting electromagnetic forming technology for the automotive industry would gain in additional benefits like - less surface damaging owing to contact less forming, - the possibility of achieving smaller radii, - focusing on low volume production through minimizing investment costs and - more manufacturing flexibility. An approach to start qualifying this technology under the focus of production engineering has been attempt by establishing a high speed forming project. The Volkswagen AG, Siemens AG, H&T ProduktionsTechnologie GmbH ogether with Fraunhofer Institute of Machine Tools and Forming Technology started activities focused on together with Fraunhofer Institute of Machine Tools and Forming Technology clarifying the fields of research and development which are not resolved until today, - developing necessary equipments and - a systematic research on the technology. The analysis of available equipments brought up a number of questions with respect to production engineering requirements. It resulted in a 100 kJ pulse power generator. One of the core components to define the quality of the forming process of flat parts is the flat coil. A coil design is selected to transfer a maximum of stored energy into the sheet metal. A selection of basic and applied experimentations had the aim to know the limits of the technique. The paper introduces some representative results of the project. It touches the challenges related to the process of bringing this technology up to production.