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The cost of any forged product for the automotive industry is highly influenced by the cost involved during the design and manufacturing of the forging tools. Ideally, these tools shall withstand a significant number of cycles, in order to divide their manufacturing cost in many parts as possible. There are several parameters that affect the wear behavior, and forging companies have different approaches to address the tribological issues. Moreover, a misunderstanding of these parameters may lead to an undesirable premature tool wear. This work analyses the effect of roughness on the wear of cold forming tools. The adopted tribosystem is the second stage of a horizontal press and consists of a punch of M2 hardened steel in relative movement against a working piece of SAE 10B22 normalized steel. Fifteen punches were manufactured with three roughness levels and their wear was measured after 50.000 and 100.000 forging cycles.

Engine downsizing is the use of a smaller engine in a vehicle that provides the power of a larger one. It is the result of car manufacturers attempting to provide more efficient vehicles by adding modern technologies, for instance, turbochargers, direct injection and variable camshaft. The smaller engine is also lighter and provides torque and power with similar performance to a much larger engine. However, the downsizing technique may lead to undesirable vibration effects on the driveline, such as structural damaging, vibration fatigue failure and extra noise. All these issues are related to natural frequencies investigation and they are often determined through the finite element method together with experimental tests during the product development phase. This work presents the finite element method limitation for natural frequencies determination of automotive components and a possible solution for the issue.

CO₂ emission reduction through weight saving remains a huge challenge for all automotive components. When it comes to gears, the state of the art shows low potential of weight reduction due to the trade-off between mass optimization and manufacturing process. Gears are usually forged followed or not by teeth cutting operation. Current presses must operate with a minimum distance between punch and die, due to the elasticity of the equipment, in order to avoid tool failure when it operates with no working piece. Also, the press force is determined by this gap, in cases that some flash is formed during forging, and a minimum flash is required for a forgeable part using the available press. This issue constrains the minimum wall thickness of a final product, for instance, the body of an automotive gear.

The finite element method (F.E.M.), often known as finite element analysis (F.E.A.) is a design tool based on a numerical process which offers an approximate solution with enough precision for engineering independently how complex the geometry or the actuating loads are. However, the precision is function of many variables and there are some possibilities to jeopardize the result. The most important of all is the stress singularity. The target of this work is to demonstrate the stress singularity problem on a real automotive part and the way to solve it. The main contribution of this theoretical engineering analysis is to avoid a wrong interpretation of the F.E. results during the product development process.

The actual needs of weight and CO2 emissions reduction on vehicles stimulate the development of compact and lightweight solutions for new applications. In order to obtain lighter solutions, it is necessary to break some paradigms. The proposal of this work is to demonstrate a method of an effective weight reduction on components of automotive transmissions. The study will be based on the optimization. The goal of this study is to demonstrate clearly and objectively the weight reduction of transmission components without jeopardizing the capacity of the load and the life by fatigue of the component, in other words, without concerns on the functionality and the efficiency of the transmission system as a whole.