• For quotation as well as to validate the feasibility with the available shop floor equipment.
• To solve production issues or to improve current forging sequences. The forging sequence can be set without repeated real-scale tryouts, thereby reducing materials costs, costs linked to the immobilization of presses, and validation time.
• At R&D level for the development of new and innovative products.

COLDFORM® makes it possible to design and validate forging sequences and to predict accurately in the part:

• final geometry and dimensions, including elastic spring-back, and more generally, material flow throughout the whole forming sequence.
• the presence of possible underfillings and folds/laps.
• fibering and strain distribution.
• marking and esay-to-use tracking features (forward or backward) of points or surface throughout the entire process. For example, the shear surface can be tracked and localized in the final geometry.
• damage.
• the distribution of residual stresses.
• and also displacements, equivalent strain, strain rate, stresses, temperatures, wear, plus any additional user fields.

The equipment choice can be validated at an early stage by an accurate prediction of the press required to forge the part.

Die life can be extended with the use of COLDFORM® die analysis capability. Thermal or thermo-mechanical computation in the dies can be run and the distribution of stresses, strain, wear, temperature, damage can be predicted at any time of the process.

COLDFORM® enables two types of analysis: a fast decoupled computation in the dies as well as a unique coupled computation between the part and the dies.

COLDFORM® offers an extensive press database: mechanical press, hydraulic press, knuckle joint press, link drive press, orbital forging press and complex piloting can also be set. Pre-stressed dies and spring loaded dies can easily be defined

Increase productivity with HPC calculation and cutting edge numerical methods

TRANSVALOR is pioneer in HPC calculation and has been offering since more than a decade a unique and advanced parallel capability which allows to reduce drastically CPU time and increase accuracy. Parallel calculation is available in COLDFORM®. It also embeds a state of the art meshing technique to address forming processes of thin products such as deep drawing, hydroforming and fine blanking. The mesh is automatically adapted to the deformation, velocity, damage and curvature and can ensure to have several elements in the thickness without impacting the total number of nodes, as opposed to classical adaptative technique.

Process parameters identification

COLDFORM® embeds an inverse analysis capability that allows to identify process parameters that cannot be measured like friction coefficient or parameters of material model. The optimal parameters are calculated fully automatically using the specified experimental curve as reference.

Fully automatic design tool

A fully automatic design tool is available in COLDFORM®. Such a tool offers major benefits like: Reduction of material cost by decreasing the initial billet weight while ensuring the final product quality requirements, Savings on energy costs by optimizing press load, extension of die life by minimizing stress levels in the dies. Each value of the parameters is determined fully automatically without any input until an optimal solution is found.

This case study highlights the benefits of the automatic design tool applied to the design of a screw-head. All the forging operations of this component are simulated with COLDFORM® starting from the initial wire. The customer wanted to improve the design of the screw-head forging operation by finding the optimal initial diameter -D- and initial height -H- thus ensuring the best die filling and therefore the best application of torque. The chart shows the highest possible torque (in blue) obtained with the best die filling (contact area represented in blue in the final shape) and corresponding to the optimal diameter and height.

Contenu du SliderCOLDFORM® embeds genuine elastic-plastic models for isotropic and anistropic materials. Included in the product is a comprehensive materials data base with more than 200 steels, aluminum, brass and titanium references and the possibility to create material data from the normalized mechanical properties provided by the manufacturer (yield strength, tensile strength and elongation). A feature to import material data from Sente Software JMatPro is also available. A wide range of friction laws is available and nonuniformed friction coefficients can be defined.

Just like FORGE®, COLDFORM® offers great flexibility of use thanks to:

• import of CAD files in neutral formats such as STEP, STL, UNV, NASTRAN/PATRAN, Parasolid.
• export in 2D and STL DXF format, UNV, 3D Ansys.
• automatic chaining between operations.
• automatic simulation report.
• solver support for up to 8 cores in parallel on a workstation.
• unlimited access to graphical interface for pre- and post-treatment

COLDFORM® is an all-inclusive product: the features described above are all supplied without extra cost as part of the software.