A Study on Thick Plate Forming for Hollow-Partitioned Steam Turbine Nozzle

In thermal and nuclear power plants, steam turbine system to generate electric power is composed of turbine rotor assemblies for high-pressure (HP) and low-pressure (LP) turbines, its main shaft, and turbine nozzle diaphragms, and so forth. Especially, the turbine nozzle diaphragm consists of many turbine nozzles with three-dimensional asymmetric shape and complicated surface curvatures at each turbine stage. In this study, main goal is tool design and fabrication, and its application to thick plate cold forming for replacing solid-type turbine nozzle manufactured by a series of metal forging process with hollow-partitioned one obtained from cold forming. The hollow-partitioned turbine nozzle (stator) has asymmetric curvature contours, so it is hard to adopt a series of draw-bead or blank holder. Thus, the thick plate as a thick blank experiences unstable and non-uniform contact on the tool surfaces in the die cavity. To easy this unstable positioning restraint in the thick plate forming, the shoulder angles of the forming punch and the lower die are selected as the geometric process parameter to control the blank position in the die cavity. The thick plate material is 409L stainless steel (SUS409L) with initial thickness of 5.00mm, and the dimensions are a length of about 980.00mm and a width of roughly 372.60mm. Uni-axial tensile tests for the initial blank material of SUS409L are performed to verify the mechanical properties including the anisotropic characteristics, and finite element simulations are carried out using ABAQUS Explicit/Implicit. As the obtained and summarized results, the suitable shoulder angle combinations of the lower die and the punch were verified as (30 degrees, 90 degrees) and (45 degrees, 90 degrees), and then the transverse blank direction (TD) of SUS409L thick plate was investigated to be well matched.