Testing and Prediction of Limits of Lubrication in Sheet Metal Forming

Increasing focus on environmental issues in industrial production has urged a number of sheet metal forming companies to look for new tribo-systems, here meaning the combination of tool_material/workpiece_material/lubricant, in order to substitute hazardous lubricants such as chlorinated paraffin oils. Testing of new tribo-systems under production conditions is, however, very costly. For preliminary testing it is more feasible to introduce laboratory tests. In this paper a new methodology for testing new tribo-systems is presented. The methodology describes a series of investigations combining laboratory and production tests as well as numerical analyses in order to evaluate and compare performance of the new tribo-systems. A part is selected from industrial production and analyzed by this methodology in order to substitute the existing tribo-system with a new one.