Reliability of the wire drawing dies

A wear based model is proposed for the dies used in wire drawing process. Using this wear model, it is possible to predict life of the die corresponding to a wear limit criterion. Since various quantities in the model are random in nature the resulting die life will also be random quantity characterized by an appropriate distribution. Using a probabilistic characterization of the parameters of the predictive model, Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to establish the die life distribution. To asses the sensitivity of life distribution with respect to various contributing variables (parameters), the simulation runs were conducted at different levels of these variables (parameters). It is shown that wire drawing die life is Weibull distributed. To compare the simulated results with actual time to failure, data of dies was obtained from a large wire drawing company and was compared with corresponding scenario generated by Monte Carlo simulation. Results obtained by Monte Carlo simulations were very close to the actual time to failure data. (author)