Investigation of deviations of the lock-position of dies due to unsteady thermal conditions

Common manufacturing technologies for mass production of automotive parts include forging presses. Eccentric presses are used in order to achieve short cycle times and high output rates. During the start-up phase of these path-bound forging presses high scrap rates occur due to the unsteady thermal conditions of the forging press. This leads to a reduced operational availability of these capital-intensive production lines and higher costs against the background of decreasing batch sizes. Similar parts were forged with differently sized raw part dimensions for the examination of the thermal influence. The impact to the lock-position was investigated by measuring the thickness of the parts. These results are used to derive a correlation from temperature and lock-position in order to predict the shift in lock-position. Thereby, the production of parts within tolerances from the start of production is possible.