Design of Hot Stamping Tools with Cooling System

Hot stamping with high strength steel is becoming more popular in automotive industry. In hot stamping, blanks are hot formed and press hardened in a water-cooled tool to achieve high strength. Hence, design of the tool with necessary cooling significantly influences the final properties of the blank and the process time. In this paper a new method based on systematic optimization to design cooling ducts in tool is introduced. The optimization procedure was coupled with FE analysis and a specific evolutionary algorithm. Through this procedure each tool component was separately optimized. Subsequently, the hot stamping process was simulated both thermally and thermo-mechanically with the combination of optimized solutions.