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Press hardening is employed in the automotive industry to produce advanced high-strength steel components for safety and structural applications. This hot forming process depends on friction as it controls the deformation of the sheet. However, friction is also associated with wear of the forming tools. Tool wear is a critical issue when it comes to the dimensional accuracy of the produced components and it reduces the service life of the tool. It is therefore desirable to enhance the durability of the tools by studying the influence of high contact pressures, cyclic thermal loading, and repetitive mechanical loading on tool wear. This is difficult to achieve in conventional tribological testing devices. Therefore, the tribological behavior of tool–workpiece material pairs at elevated temperatures was studied in a newly developed experimental setup simulating the conditions prevalent during interaction of the hot sheet with the tool surface. Uncoated 22MnB5 steel and aluminum–silicon (Al–Si)-coated 22MnB5 steel were tested at 750 °C and 920 °C, respectively. It was found that higher loads led to lower and more stable friction coefficients independent of sliding velocity or surface material. The influence of sliding velocity on the coefficient of friction was only marginal. In the case of Al–Si-coated 22MnB5, the friction coefficient was generally higher and unstable due to transfer of Al–Si coating material to the tool. Adhesion was the main wear mechanism in the case of uncoated 22MnB5.

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Press hardening is widely utilized to form ultrahigh-strength steels characterized by a high strength-toweight ratio for automotive components. Press hardening processes include heating boron-manganese steels to austenite phase, forming the steels at a high temperature, and cooling the formed blanks until the martensite phase is reached. However, press hardening processes lead to severe contact conditions between the blank and the tools including contact pressure, relative sliding, and high temperatures, which result in tool wear and increased maintenance cost. The contact conditions that occur in the stamping tool are difficult to study on site. Additionally, simplified tests, such as pin on disc and ball on disc, are insufficient to reproduce press hardening conditions in laboratory environments. The aim of this study includes developing a tribological test with press hardening conditions in which tool steel pins continuously slide on fresh and hot boron-manganese steel strips. The test programme mimics press hardening conditions with respect to sliding distance, sliding velocity, contact pressure, and surface temperature that were studied based on finite element (FE) simulations of a press hardening experiment. Furthermore, a FE simulation of the tribological test is established and it provides contact temperature in the pin tip with a high accuracy. A tribological test is used to study friction and mass loss with variational pressures and velocities that represented typically variational contact conditions in the press hardening. The tribological test is also used to obtain correlations between the tribological behaviours and process parameters in press hardening including pressure and sliding velocity.