Electromagnetic pulse power – Innovative and green production technology for shearing and cutting

Project time: 2010 – 2012

Budget: 1 030 000 SEK

Funding: FFI – Strategic Vehicle Research and Innovation

This project was using electromagnetic pulse power to develop a new unique innovative production process in the following area: Adiabatic cutting/shearing – The major benefit is the ability to create holes in steel sheet materials by single side punching holes.

The use of electromagnetic pulse power for joining and crimping of axisymmetric tubular components has been used in production at the aerospace industry since beginning of 1960´s. The fundamental physical phenomena is to produce a short-duration, high intensity magnetic field. The obtained magnetic field creates a magnetic pressure that can be used for development of new production processes for sheet metals like forming, crimping, welding and cutting/shearing. The first experiments were made at Winset Technologies in Long Island, New York due to their long term knowledge of manufacturing high velocity electromagnetic punch presses, former Lourdes Systems. Ultra-high strength sheet materials were used for the experiments and the results were that the obtained holes had tremendous quality. Still, this system had a die as back-up and our attempt were to made a punching device that increase the speed of the punch to a velocity that would create holes without any tool back-up. This led us to use the capacitor bank (A Pulsar magnetic pulse system) that can be found at Swerea KIMAB and design a flat coil to the inertial data from the system. We had a lot of failures with burning cables and assembly issues as well of bad design of the first coil. In July 2012 we made some test with a single turn flat coil but the results showed no major movement of the punch device. By consulting a parallel project at Ohio State University, Columbus, USA we did get the information that a multi turn coil with 6-8 windings would improve the energy level with 6 to 8 times for a system like ours. In March 2013 we did some last attempts and we did succeed to invent a high speed punching device. Unfortunately the capacitors bank were too weak to achieve the energy level for creating a hole in a steel sheet material but for a soft sheet of Al alloy sheet a hole did occur. The conclusion would be that a high speed electromagnetic punching device could be invented for making holes in sheet metals without any back up if the energy level in the capacitors would be higher than in the present set up.

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