A study on the cold ironing process for the drum clutch with inner gear shapes

This paper describes a 3D FE simulation of the cold ironing process for forming the drum clutch, the main part component of the automatic transmission. The process of the drum clutch with inner gears that was employed in this study consists of 12 steps associated with nine deep drawing processes and three ironing processes to form the inner gear shape. The ironing processes were focused on this study in order to estimate the dimensional accuracy of the inner gear shape according to the process variables such as the punch shape, the approach angle of the punch, and the thickness reduction ratio. A rigid-plastic finite element simulation was applied to analyze the deformation characteristics of the ironing processes and to determine the optimum parameter for selected conditions. Finally, an experiment on the whole drum clutch forming process was carried out to examine the validity of the analytical results and the chosen parameters.