온간하이드로포밍을 이용한 알루미늄 자동차부품 제조기술 개발

Development of Manufacturing Technology for Aluminum Automotive part with Warm Hydroforming

Warm forming technology was classified into hot gas forming of using compressible fluid as a nitrogen gas and warm hydroforming of using the incompressible fluid as a thermal oil by using medium fluid. In this study, the aluminum side-rail part was developed with warm hydroforming technology. For the warm hydroforming system, top and bottom die was designed to insert heating cartridge in die cavity and special indirect fluid heating system was designed to heat the thermal oil. As increase the temperature, hydroformability was increased linearly. Aluminum side-rail center part was formed 90% at the internal pressure of 100bar and perfectly formed at 300bar within a moderate temperature. The tube material used for warm hydroforming was a aluminum 6000 series alloy with the diameter of 120mm, thickness of 5mm, length of 1,300mm. Warm hydroformed side-rail center part had 20% of maximum expansion ratio and below 20% of maximum thinning ratio at corner radius. This results were provided to show warm hydroforming possibility for aluminum automotive components.