An evaluation scheme incorporating digital characteristics for transient tribological behaviours under complex loading conditions for the hot stamping process

The growing availability of metal forming data has driven a new era of data-centric approaches in digital manufacturing. This wealth of data enables the development of digitally enhanced metal forming processes and associated technologies. In this work, using the hot stamping data obtained from a cloud-based manufacturing database, the digital characteristics (DC), defined as the visualisation of a specific manufacturing process containing essential information spanning over the design, manufacturing, and application phases of the products, were unlocked for the hot stamping process. The complex contact conditions were successfully visualised by the hot stamping DC. Following this discovery, the performance of transient lubricant behaviours was evaluated under complex loading and constant loading conditions regarding coefficient of friction evolution and lubricant limit diagram (LLD), which is a digitally-enhanced approach to enable the quantitative evaluation of different lubricants. Results demonstrate that the efficacy of DC-enhanced methodology facilitates the insightful comprehension of transient tribological behaviours and offers great potential on customised lubricant development towards optimisation of hot stamping and metal forming processes. • Developed digital characteristics for hot stamping to reveal complex loading condition. • Digitally revealed lubricant performance under complex and constant loading conditions. • Mapped lubricant limit diagram to quantitatively evaluate lubricant performance in metal forming. • Proposed a novel DC-enhanced lubricant evaluation methodology for any given metal forming processes.