Mid Sweden University

The manufacturing of cemented carbide tools is a continuous process that keeps developing along with new technologies and possibilities. To increase efficiency when developing these tools, every step in the process needs to be optimized and kept up to date in order to remain relevant in a competitive market.

This report presents a new method for free-form compensation with the use of newly developed simulations. The simulation creates a deformed model that accurately identifies most of the deformations that occur during the press and sinter of an insert. With this data, it becomes possible to perform compensations before any tool is produced. This will allow a higher efficiency when developing new tools and in turn, reduce the material waste.

The developed method is based on point cloud transformation which can be reconstructed to allow an automated compensation process. By using the simulated data and nominal model, the difference between every surface point can be calculated and compensated accordingly using MATLAB.

In this project, a completely new insert has been designed with extreme geometrical shapes to evaluate the method. To verify this, two prototypes have been created. One reference insert with the usual 18% compensation and an insert based on the new compensation method. By comparing the two, it is visible that the method effectively reduces the tolerances on the first compensation loop. There is, however, much work left to implement this method in today's manufacturing. In order to use the method, several steps need to be tested further. The goal of this method is to completely remove the need for several compensation loops and prevent manual compensation practice.