Strains in Aluminum Stamp Formed Pans Resulting From Closed-Loop Control of Local Forces

A stamp forming die, whose flexible blank holder was designed using FEA, was built. A closed-loop control system was used to control local punch forces and wrinkling by controlling both blank holder forces and draw bead penetration. The controllers for the draw beads featured an advanced PID controller with a Smith Predictor and Kalman Filter. A Bang-bang controller was also incorporated into the control system in order prevent control saturation. Fuzzy logic was used to transition from once controller to the other. Once closed-loop was implemented, tests were performed to evaluate the strains in the pans for various forming conditions. These results were compared to open-loop tests and it was found that the strains measured from closed-loop control tests resulted in more uniform strains and that the strains were further from the forming limit curves than strains from tests that were performed under open-loop conditions. Furthermore, it was seen that the strains in the regions were local force were controlled resulted in more uniform strain fields. Hence it was concluded that controlling local punch forces resulted in the strain control of critical regions.