Lubricant Film Breakdown and Material Pick-Up in Sheet Forming of Advanced High Strength Steels and Stainless Steels when Using Environmental Friendly Lubricants

Increasing focus on environmental issues in industrial production has urged sheet metal stamping companies to look for new tribo-systems in order to substitute hazardous lubricants such as chlorinated paraffin oils. The efficiency of chlorinated paraffin is due to the fact that the lubricant reacts chemically with the tool and workpiece material forming thin films, which adhere strongly to the surfaces and reduce the tendency to metal-metal contact and material pick-up. Production tests of new, environmentally benign tribo-systems are, however, costly and laboratory tests are preferred as a preliminary simulative method to investigate alternative tribo-systems. The present paper presents a case study where an industrial process, consisting of deep drawing with two subsequent re-drawings, was selected and four potential new tribo-systems were tested including different workpiece materials, i.e. AHSSs and stainless steels. The performance of the tribo-systems was analyzed in the laboratory by means of a newly developed simulative test as well as in an industrial production process. The results obtained show a good agreement between the laboratory test and the industrial production process regarding the tribological performance, i.e. tendency to material pick-up and galling, of the evaluated tribo-systems. Moreover the SEM analysis shows that different workpiece materials result in different types of material pick-up.