Development of a Common Single-Die Exchange Technique for a Common Die Design in a Forging Process of a Thick Sheet

Abstract

To minimize the production time is a key success leading to lower the entire production cost and reduce the time for a product to a market. One of the time-waste according to the lean manufacturing concept is the installation of forming dies to a press. Many methodologies are being developed to solve this problem, such as a Single Minute Exchange Die System (SMED) which considers only the technique to minimize the installation of forming dies to almost 25–30 percent, but it does not consider the minimization of the forming process or sequence. Most of the time, the automotive industries reduce the time to install the die problem by standardizing some of the die components. These parts are centralized the function for different car models. However, this technique cannot reduce the time in development of the forming processes/dies, but the number of the forming dies still remains unchanged. Therefore, in this research, Common Single-Die Exchange Technique (C-SDET) integrated with Finite Element Modeling was proposed to develop generalized common dies by utilizing the same part configurations/shapes but difference in dimensions at some areas. This technique was applied and validated with different pulley models. The results show that almost 60 percent of the forming dies can be reduced.