Tribological investigations of water-based lubricants for application in the deep drawing process

Abstract This paper describes the tribological investigation of water-based lubricants in the context of a deep drawing process. Therefore, different methods were conducted in order to determinate the suitability of these lubricants for a deep drawing process. Three lubricant manufacturers each provided their lubricants as part of this work. The sheet materials investigated are an aluminum material (AA6014) and two steel materials (DC04, DP800), each with a thickness of 1.5 mm. All sheet materials were examined in the as-delivered condition as part of this work. The hypothesis for this research proposal is that it is possible to achieve comparable tribological properties in sheet metal forming using water-based lubricants as when using mineral oil-based lubricants. The aim is to optimize a tribological system for water-based lubricants when used as additional lubrication in order to replace mineral oil-based lubricants and, as a result, to shorten the representative process chain by one process step (cleaning). In the course of this work, topographical measurements of the sheet materials were carried out in order to investigate the lubricant holding capacity of the sheet materials. Furthermore, strip drawing tests were performed to determine the friction coefficients of the different lubricant-sheet combinations. The final step was to conduct deep-drawing tests to determine the limits of use of the water-based lubricants by continuously increasing the holding-down force.