SUSCEPTOBILITY TO THERMAL FATIGUE OF CLOSED DIE HOT FORGING DIES

Abstract

Hot forging dies providing high productive performance reduce production costs. The lifetime of the dies is expressed by the number of forgings (production cycle) produced before being rejected by the presence of a failure mechanism, associated with unacceptable dimensions and or geometry of the end product or even breakage of the dies. One of the failure mechanisms of hot forging dies is thermal fatigue, caused by cyclic heating and cooling. A subroutine, based on the work of Maim and Norstrom [1], was developed for the DEFORM 2D numerical software, using the finite element method, in order to predict die regions susceptible to thermal fatigue. The use of adequate coefficients for the description of the heat transfer phenomena allowed the validation of the proposed subroutine.

Keywords

• Hot forging; Thermal fatigue; Finite elements; H13 steel.