Analysis of Hot Stamping Tool Cooling System—A Case Study

One of the important steps in the design of hot stamping tools is the analysis of their cooling system. This article presents an authorial, two-stage approach to solving this problem. The first stage consisted of a series of simulations of the hot stamping process in the Autoform package, with initial selection of shape and arrangement of cooling channels. These results allowed for the design of the tool for which the coupled thermal-flow analysis was carried out. The correctness of the adopted design assumptions has been confirmed by experimental tests. A trial series of drawpieces made in production conditions meet the requirements for hardness, mechanical properties, and appropriate microstructure. The presented procedure has become the practice of the drawpiece producers.