• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.31 no.8
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• pp.833-838
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• 2007

In tube hydroforming process, several defective products could be obtained such as bursting, wrinkling, folding, buckling. Because, especially, bursting is most frequently occurred failure among the well known failures, it is mostly important to predict the onset of bursting failure on tube hydroforming process. For most sheet metal forming processes, strain based forming limit diagram(FLD) is used often as a criteria to estimate the possibility of onset of the failures proposed above. However, FLD has a shortcoming that it is dependent on strain path while stress based diagram is independent on strain history. Generally, tube hydroforming consists of three main processes such as pre-bending, pre-forming, and hydroforming and it means that the strain histories of final products are nonlinear. Therefore, forming limit stress diagram(FLSD) is more suitable to predict forming limit for hydroforming parts. In this study, FLSD is applied to estimate bursting failure for an engine cradle of an automobile part. Consequently, it is proved that application of FLSD to predict forming limit is available for tube hydroforming parts.