Finite Element Analysis and Experimental Confirmation of Warm Hydroforming Process

온간 하이드로포밍에 관한 유한요소해석 및 실험적 검증

The hydroformability of aluminum alloy sheets at elevated temperatures have been investigated in this study. It is necessary to analyze the variations of the mechanical properties that depend on the forming temperature and the heat conduction during warm hydroforming. Therefore, in this study a coupled simulation of plastic deformation and temperature distribution in the warm hydroforming process is performed and compared with experimental data. The multi-purpose code DEFORM-2D can handle this type of calculations but it takes high computation time if contact heat transfer between die, tube and pressure medium occurs. Experiments were conducted by high temperature tribometer(pin-on-disk) allowing measuring the friction coefficients of the aluminum alloys at several temperatures and these results are applied to the coupled simulation by which the optimal process parameters such as internal pressure and preset temperature on hydroformability can be determined. The comparison of the FE analysis with the experimental results has shown that hydroformability given by bulge height, and temperature distribution of the tube specimen make a little difference with the FE results but the trend predicted by simulation agrees well with experiments.