12th Tooling Conference & Exhibition - Tooling 2022

ROTA 2030 (in English, Route 2030) is a Brazilian strategic program for developing the automotive sector. Among its priority lines, it focuses on bringing competitiveness to the Brazilian tooling industrial sector. Called “Ferramentarias Brasileiras Mais Competitivas” (in English “More Competitive Brazilian Tool Shops”), it is a line organized in four axes, among which the first three support projects with different levels of maturity. The fourth axis proposes the use of “demonstrators” to identify challenges and gaps in the Brazilian tooling sector. In this context, this paper briefly introduces the project, named after the acronym of Demonstrador de Estampagem de Superfícies Classe “A” - DEMESTAA (in English, Class “A” Surface Die Demonstrator). Class “A” surfaces are known in the automotive industry for their difficult-to-reach aesthetic, with often surface defects. The DEMESTAA demonstrator consists of a Die Set for producing an automotive door as a single part. It aims at representing all the main challenges faced by manufacturers to make those aesthetic automotive parts. Remarkably, this paper presents the methodology adopted in the DEMESTAA Project for defining requirements and setting up the technical specification of the demonstrator. It discusses the main challenges faced in this process as well as the solutions adopted. This specification encompasses the first four phases of the die tool lifecycle, known as Die Engineering, Die Design, Manufacturing, and Try-out. Among the discussed issues are: how to assure the representativeness of the specification; how to characterize the best practices adopted by automotive OEMs; how to deal with the lack of public standards representative of the automotive requirements; how to define information and data to be collected in the development process and the main operational bottlenecks in the construction of a tooling; between consensus among the more than 20 industrial partners that participate in the DEMESTAA Project.