Thermal Analysis of Bending Under Tension Test

The tribological conditions in deep drawing can be simulated in the Bending Under Tension test to evaluate the performance of new lubricants, tool materials, etc. Deep drawing production with automatic handling runs normally at high rate. This implies considerable heating of the tools, which sometimes can cause lubricant film breakdown and galling. In order to replicate the production conditions in bending under tension testing it is thus important to control the tool/workpiece interface temperature. This can be done by pre-heating the tool, but it is essential that the interface temperature during testing is similar to the one in the production tool. A universal sheet tribo-tester has been developed, which can run multiple tests automatically from coil. This allows emulating the temperature increase as in production. The present work performs finite element analysis of the evolution and distribution of temperature in the bending under tension test by making use of boundary conditions and calibration values directly measured from experiments. The overall methodology combines 2D and 3D models of the bending under tension test with steady state and transient thermal and thermo-mechanical procedures. Results show that the proposed methodology applied to a single stroke can effectively and accurately predict the interface temperature in the test tool, thus avoiding the otherwise required thousands of thermo-mechanical FEM analyses of temperature development during testing before thermal steady state has been reached.