Objective Increasingly the sheet metal industry has to meet specific customer demands. Consequence are lower production volumes and smaller series. Also, strong pressure is exerted on industry to decrease the 'time to market'. These trends especially effect the economy of deep drawing, since tool making costs and lead time represent a significant share in the cost price and throughput time of the part. Deep drawing itself is an excellent technique for manufacturing complicated parts from thin metal sheet. A reduction in cost and lead time in tool making for small series production is possible by applying optimized fabrication routes and easy to work tool rnaterials. It is estimated that tool costs and lead time may be reduced with 30-50 % and 20-40 % respectively. A bottleneck for applying such methods by SMEs however is the lack of objective knowledge considering the most optimal fabrication routes and their behaviour in forming processes (wear, friction, effect on process control). Hence aim of the proposed work is to reduce tooling costs in SMEs for their deep drawing processes by developing a procedure for selecting and applying of low cost tooling. The procedure will take into account on the one hand the functional behaviour of low cost tool materials and on the other hand the specific routing from product design to die. Opportunities for this project are given by the state of the art in CAD/CAM-systems, new tooling materials and alternative tooling manufacturing. Programme(s) FP4-BRITE/EURAM 3 - Specific research and technological development programme in the field of industrial and materials technologies, 1994-1998 Topic(s) 0101 - Incorporation of new technologies into production systems Call for proposal Data not available Funding Scheme EAW - Exploratory awards Coordinator FLEX-O-THERM B.V. Address 36,zelhemseweg 36 7255 PT Hengelo gld Netherlands See on map EU contribution € 0,00 Participants (2) Sort alphabetically Sort by EU Contribution Expand all Collapse all OBO-WERKE GmbH & Co. KG Germany EU contribution € 0,00 Address 5,am bannhof 31655 Stadthagen See on map Schouten en Visschers BV Netherlands EU contribution € 0,00 Address 269,stationstraat 8261 CS Epe See on map
