Hot Air forming Analysis of Aluminum Tube

알루미늄 튜브의 열간가스 성형해석

The application of light weight materials, such as aluminum alloy, has been limited due of their poor formability. Especially, aluminum alloy tube has limited expansion capability at most 15% at room temperature. New manufacturing process, called hot air forming, is introduced to apply aluminum tube to the automotive suspension components which have complex shape and require high expansion ratio about 40%. The process is carried out at the elevated temperature above $500^{\circ}C$, so numerous material properties and process parameters related to the high temperature should be investigated and determined to get a sound product. In this study, the effect of thermal properties and forming parameters such as the temperature of tool, axial feeding and gas pressure are analyzed by using explicit finite element method.