Ultrasonic deep drawing cuts friction by 20%, extends tool lifespan | Hacker News Reader

Ultrasonic deep drawing cuts friction by 20%, extends tool lifespan

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109 pointsPaulHoule29 comments

Deep draw makes a lot of parts, including your soda cans. If they can roll it out in practice, this is a big deal.

And yes, to the MP3 commenters, Fraunhofer has many centers doing lots of industrial research on manufacturing technology. The German research approach is to pick a topic and set up a Fraunhofer institute in particular city for that, whereas the US has NSF, DARPA, DOE, the national labs all working Willy Nilly with whoever, wherever. MP3 was done mostly at the Fraunhofer in Erlangen. I’ve worked on CNC things with the Fraunhofer folks in Aachen and elsewhere.

It took a while to parse this headline.

(Ultrasonic (deep drawing)) : (((cuts friction) by 20%) & (extends (tool lifespan)))

Apparently "deep drawing" is a metallurgic process.

It just means you're stretching and pulling in sheet metal to make a shape with depth. A simple one would be aluminum cans.

Deep drawing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_drawing

That's interesting, why is it called drawing when the actual motion is pushing or pressing? I would've expected drawing to mean pulling by means of vacuum or similar.

It's only pushing from the perspective of the punch.

Blacksmiths draw out metal by pushing with their hammers. Same thing.

The blank (typically just a flat disc) is wider than the finished product and so the metal that will eventually form the wall starts outside the perimeter of the finished product. When the punch moves downwards, it hits what will become the bottom and then "draws in" the rest of the material. Hence the name.

See https://www.manufacturingguide.com/en/deep-drawing for a graphical illustration.

This would be fun: Put an AI bot with an input and a Deep Draw output with Protein Folding logic to make a cellular wall...

("make a deep draw wall based on protein folding

This is fun:

https://i.imgur.com/JRCE4Xr.png

https://i.imgur.com/aEgNRih.png

https://i.imgur.com/4w8H9Tg.png

https://i.imgur.com/FE6GkJH.png

I need to work on it though.

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https://i.imgur.com/ORc6ueK.png

https://i.imgur.com/ClH4Coy.png

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https://i.imgur.com/CTslAxE.png

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https://i.imgur.com/pUhSGho.png

I need to attempt in Cursor or Windsurf Agent mode and have it build a scene

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https://i.imgur.com/vQm92yC.png

https://i.imgur.com/xvRBSBO.png

Not a physicist, haven't done ultrasonic drawing but have experimentally designed and tested ultrasonic polymer welding systems from scratch. Ultrasonic energy transfer is impressive but it has a lot of downsides: including but not limited to high sensitivity to target geometry, input vector, pressure, and feed rate. I guess in a deep draw application near-uniform pressure distribution and feed rate are both guaranteed but the input vector may be very expensive to iterate. I guess maybe these wins are documented on thin materials with custom tooling for ultrasonic input and the additional cost of tool design and energy input is not computed. Perhaps a subset of this technique may become popular, for instance application to outermost draw profile edges where perhaps tears are more common and access remains easier, which might enable more generic and portable (nominally draw punch and die independent) ultrasonic input.

Minor tangent, what do you think about applying ultrasound in FDM Ed printing? We should chat!

About twenty years ago the big discovery in pressing sheet metal was electromagnetism. It let them make deeper dies, and I believe generate less heat and wear with existing dies.

I wonder if these solutions compose, or if the magnets were introducing ultrasonic noise.

It sounds like they've managed to include a non-thermal form of annealing[1] into the press/stamping process. A quick Google shows that this seems to be an area of much closed research and trade secrets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibratory_stress_relief

I had a machine shop pitch this idea to me. They had such a device and asked if they could use it when making some of our parts. I said sure, what's the harm, thinking it couldn't possibly be effective for stress relief. It sounded like they had been sold some snake oil. Thanks for the link.

This reminds me of fluxless ultrasonic “active” soldering which allows for bonding metals to ceramics and otherwise difficult metals: https://youtu.be/WuYdsStS1MQ

Didn’t know the people behind the mp3 format were into tooling for metalworking. Guess it makes sense, it involves a practical application for use of sound, and they are a research institution.

I wonder if the metal can hear the difference if it’s not the full 192 kHz.

I'm not sure we can call it "the people behind the mp3 format". Fraunhofer is a very big instituion.

May be "PeopleS behind the mp3 format"? :))))

Really, I hear in early 90s, how Telefunken developed PAL TV standard (and also RGB, YUV and some other things, now you could read about on Wikipedia).

- They working like Gallop - asked people from street, to answer simple questions like "is this color Red or Yellow?", and with large number of samples they got statistical approximation, about curves of sensitivity of human eye, and then just use these approximation as direct wavelengths for Red/Green/Blue respectively.

Fraunhofer, as I know, used similar approach, but for sound, and got model of sensitivity of human ear.

So, what I want to say, for these researches don't need many scientists, but need wide enough sample and good reliable execution of math.

BTW, much later I read about research conducted in US air forces, targeting some ideal human pilot size to made most convenient plane control (and sure cheapest).

But they got so disappointing results, that have decide to make pivot - instead of make one standard size, they designed usual for us now adjustable chairs, tilting steering wheel, and pedals with adjustable suspension.

That's not the same group. "Fraunhofer" is not a single group but the umbrella organization for 76 different institutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society

Here's a random video I found explaining what deep drawing is (skipped past the intro boilerplate): https://youtu.be/O3Wx1HA3fns?t=35

This has my gears turning wondering what other ultrasonic “lubrication” applications might be possible. Potentially a whole world of industrial and mechanical improvements.

I'd think that the pressure in these forming operations would be too great for the ultrasonics to really matter, but apparently not. If they can scale it up to things like extrusions it could be a big deal.

The most interesting one I came across was a cutting tool [1]. Have you ever noticed that if you wiggle a box cutter while pushing that it tends to lock up less? This is pretty much that except high frequency.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hanboost/hanboost-c1-ul...

This reads like a press release. Is there any actual information available?

It’s actually just jargon-ified. When pressing a piece of sheet metal into a die (concave form) with a punch (convex form) to stretch and compress the metal into a deep shape (e.g., a cup, can, etc.), using ultrasound to induce some wiggles can reduce the chance of tearing, likely allowing for less material use and greater yield rates for a machining process.

Basically, if you’re forming metal with high force, give it some high speed micro-wiggles and things will be better.

This should feel pretty natural for folks who have tried to squeeze into skinny jeans after Thanksgiving.

I actually understood the jargon fine. It just felt like a puff piece.

I think that's fair, though "vibration is kind of like lubrication" is a solid move.

Sonic lubricant!

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