Sensitivity analysis of effect related with material process and assembly variations to loads deformation and stress on HSS stamping die

During stamping process, the material properties, process design parameters and production environments inevitably have variation and noisy factors, which possibly affect the sheet metal formability and the deformation of the die structure. After gaining a success in applying sheet metal forming numerical simulation analysis to get the forming loads during stamping process, a methodology of die structure analysis based on sheet metal forming simulation was proposed and validated by experiments. Based on these results, the effect related with initial blank thickness, blank holder force, blank positioning error and die alignment error variations to a DP600 hyperbolic bottomed cup drawing die’s forming loads (especially unbalanced loads), and deformation and stress was studied numerically. The influence level of these variations to the die’s forming loads, deformation and stress was disclosed. The findings can guide die design, die tryout and process control for high-strength steel (HSS) stamping with increased forming load and decreased sheet metal formability.