How to Develop and Improve Product Quality Through Virtual Simulations

One of the best ways of improving your operation’s profitability is by enhancing your product quality. There are many changes you can make to improve your product’s quality and performance, like changing materials or improving your product design. Simulations can help you find the best materials and make the right product changes quickly and accurately.

We often talk about forming sheet metal parts, stamped from a familiar sheet of steel, aluminum, or some other standard material, but what about perforated sheet? How about a product like a speaker grill that has to be stamped from perforated sheet?

Example: speaker grill pressed from a perforated sheet.

Perforated sheet is sheet metal (or other material) with a pattern of holes throughout the sheet. The holes may be round, hexagonal, slots, or any shape. Often products such as speaker grills, covers, heat shields, etc may be made from a perforated sheet.

Because the holes (perforations) in the sheet significantly reduce the volume of material being formed, a product designed from perforated sheet will benefit from simulation to ensure the desired geometry can be formed without defects. In this article, we show an example of how a sheet of perforated material can be simulated.

Crash forming a perforated sheet. Where do the wrinkles go?

In this example, the perforated sheet is crash formed. Crash forming a normal sheet of steel would certainly wrinkle badly!! This can be seen in simulation and in reality. However, the perforated sheet performs differently. The holes in the sheet allow the compressive strains to be “absorbed” and the wrinkles “disappear”. The same is found in reality. The holes (perforations) change shape which indicates the compressive strains have been “taken up” by the holes and this keeps the sheet from folding over, as it otherwise would.

A solid sheet wrinkles badly.

The perforated sheet “absorbs” the wrinkles as predicted in simulation.

Other common outcomes from simulating perforated sheet are finding splits where the material is strained beyond its limits between the perforations. Simulation can find and eliminate such splitting before any tooling is made, and prior to finalizing a product design.

Splitting in perforated sheet….found in simulation and reality.

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StampingSimulation specializes in sheet metal forming simulations of all types, including those using perforated sheet.

To learn more about what we can do for your project, contact us today.