Abstract
As a stator for steam turbine diaphragm, hollow-type nozzle stator to substitute for conventional solid one is introduced in this study. This hollowed stator can be separated into two parts such as upper and lower plates with large and curved surface area. This study focuses on thick plate forming process for the upper plate of the hollow-partitioned nozzle stator. First, to reduce forming defects such as under-cut and localized thinning of the deformed plate, and to avoid tool interruption between forming punch and lower die, tool design including the position determination of forming surfaces is performed. Uni-axial tensile tests are carried out using SUS409L steel plate with initial thickness of 5.00mm, and plastic strain ratio (r-value) is also obtained. Due to the asymmetric curved configuration of the upper plate, it is hard to adopt a series of blank holder or draw-bead, so the initial plate during this thick plate forming experiences unstable and non-uniform contact. To easy this forming difficulty and find suitable tool geometry without sliding behavior of the workpiece in the die cavity, two geometric parameters with respect to each shoulder angle of the lower die and the upper punch are adopted. FE models with consideration of 21 combinations for the geometric parameters are built-up, and numerical simulations are performed. From the simulated and predicted results, it is shown that the geometric parameter combinations with ($30^{\circ}$, $90^{\circ}$) and ($45^{\circ}$, $90^{\circ}$) for the shoulder angle of the lower die and the upper punch are suitably applied to this upper plate forming of the hollow-partitioned nozzle stator used for the turbine diaphragm.
