A Production-oriented Approach in Electromagnetic Forming of Metal Sheets

Abstract

parts per unit. Especially demands of modern lightweight design seem 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 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 aspect of production engineering has been attempted by establishing a high speed forming project. The Volkswagen AG, Siemens AG, H&T ProduktionsTechnologie GmbH together with Fraunhofer Institute of Machine Tools and Forming Technology started activities focusing on - clarifying the fields of research and development which are not resolved to date, - developing necessary equipment, and - a systematic research on the according 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 experiments 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 to production