Experimental and Numerical Study of Preform Design in Multi Stage Deep Drawing of High Strength Thin Steel Sheet

In this paper, experimental results of a deep drawing process to produce a cylinder of high strength steel with a spherical head were compared with it’s simulation results and three proposal design types. Meanwhile, the amount of limiting draw ratio in some stages was determined. Accuracy and precision of the results of a finite element software to predicting the multi stage deep drawing process of high-strength thin steel sheets was measured. ABAQUS version 6-9-3 was used to simulate the process. In this research, the raw material was a circular blank of annealed steel AISI-4130 with 2 mm thickness that in experimental test, subjected to one drawing stages, three redrawing stage and two heat treatment stages. The uni-axial tensile test was performed to determine the mechanical properties of the steel sheet. Numerical thickness distribution was compared with the experimental results in different stages of deep drawing and the accuracy was good (about 2.55%). Base on this results the proposal designs were simulated to introduce the properties of the most suitable design types.