Optimal Design for Cooling System of Hot Stamping Dies

Cooling system design is one of the key technologies for the hot stamping process, and the properties and the production efficiency of the advanced high strength hot-stamped parts are greatly influenced by the cooling performance of the hot stamping dies. In this paper, a new selection criterion for the cooling channel parameters including the channel diameter, the number of the channels and the distance from the channel center to the die contact surface was developed, and a cooling channel structure optimization method based on the difficult degree of cooling was proposed. Using the criterion, cooling channels of the hot stamping dies for an anti-collision beam were designed, and the effect of the designed cooling systems was measured according to the cooling intensity, uniformity and the die strength by simulation. Based on the simulation results, the structure of the cooling channels was optimized. Results show that all the cooling systems designed based on the cooling channel design method can meet the requirements of the cooling intensity and the die strength, while cooling systems with smaller cooling channel diameter are recommended to be the better choices in terms of the cooling uniformity. In addition, the cooling uniformity and intensity of the cooling system optimized based on the difficult degree of cooling can be both improved. According to the simulation results, the hot stamping dies for the anti-collision beam were manufactured, and the high quality hot stamped part was achieved, which proved the rationality of the cooling channel design method.