An experimental and numerical study of the wall ironing process of polymer coated sheet metal

In the traditional manufacturing process for metal food and beverage containers, a food contact-safe lacquer is sprayed onto the can before filling. This time consuming and therefore expensive process can be eliminated using a polymer coated sheet metal provided that the polymer will survive the manufacturing operations. The most critical stage in can making is the ironing process because of the large deformations that occur. This paper presents experimental and numerical results regarding the ironing process of polymer coated aluminium and polymer coated steel. A plane strain strip ironing device has been constructed to investigate the influence of the ironing reduction, velocity and die angle on the process forces and friction. Furthermore, an in-situ study of the displacement and strain fields has been performed in the strip ironing experiments using a digital image correlation technique. Simulations of the process have been performed using an arbitrary Lagrange Euler method based on an operator splitting procedure (OS-ALE). The constitutive behaviour of metal and polymer has been modelled with a generalised compressible Leonov model with a Bodner–Partom and an Eyring viscosity function, respectively. The experimental results are in good agreement with numerical simulations.