In recent years, the rapid development of the automotive industry has greatly driven the development of the automotive mold industry. Since automotive parts molds are technical products and typical customized products, especially the technical content of automotive body panel molds is very high. Improving production efficiency, shortening the development cycle, improving mold technology level, and reducing production costs have always been problems faced by mold companies.
To shorten the development cycle of molds, at the technical preparation stage of mold production, vehicle manufacturers generally provide their own design models of whole vehicles or parts to mold manufacturers, for planning mold development programs, developing budgets, planning and stamping process schemes, conducting drawing design, preliminary design of stretch and casting, and other tasks.
When designing automotive parts molds, it is recommended to use the mold design standard database provided by the vehicle manufacturer or the company itself, including standard parts for separate parts, standard components with assembly structures, mold structure databases, and typical mold structure databases to allow technical personnel to call and copy when designing molds, improving the design efficiency and utilization rate of mold standard parts, and realizing the normalization, serialization, and standardization of mold structure. The comprehensive promotion of mold standard parts, including small and medium-sized mold frames, punching and cutting devices, guide devices, limiting devices, positioning devices, press-off material devices, oblique wedge side punch devices, pneumatic devices, nitrogen springs, and spring return devices, can play a vital role in shortening delivery cycles and stabilizing mold quality.
Currently, the finite element method is widely used in the simulation analysis of computer modeling in mold technology. Through mold simulation, the entire production process can avoid detours and further shorten the delivery cycle.
Different vehicle manufacturers have different requirements for the selection of materials for automotive parts molds. Currently, nodular cast iron is mainly used as the material for stretch molds instead of alloy cast iron. Nodular cast iron has ideal weldability, processability, wear resistance, and surface quenching hardness while costing much less than alloy cast iron. For trimming edge materials, profiled block is used instead of cast steel, mainly because the cost of cast steel is much higher. A large number of special cast iron materials with integrated matrix and edge are used for trimming molds, greatly reducing the machining cost of molds. Please note that the edge here is neither built-up nor made of steel, and the cast iron overall edge is only flame quenched on the surface, directly used for thin plate trimming molds with hundreds of thousands of service lives. Moreover, the cost of this type of casting is not high.
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