Die wear in stamping of advanced high strength steels – Investigations on the effects of substrate material and hard-coatings

This study intended to investigate the wear performance of different coatings (two different PVD, a CVD, and a TD coating) applied onto variety of substrate materials (DC 53, SKD 11, DRM 3, DRM 51) against AHSS sheet blanks. A non-reciprocating, CNC-based, slider type of tester was employed in wear tests. In effect of coating study, it was found that TD coated samples performed slightly better than the other samples. The substrate material effect study, on the other hand, revealed that the TD coated DRM 3 and DRM 51 die samples attained the lowest specific wear rate.