• 한국자동차공학회논문집
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• 제16권1호
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• pp.86-92
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• 2008

Recently, the use of tubes in the manufacturing of the automobile parts has increased and therefore many automotive manufactures have tried to use hydro-forming technology. The hydro-forming technology may cause many advantages to automotive applications in terms of better structural integrity of the parts, lower cost from fewer part count, material saving, weight reduction, lower spring-back, improved strength and durability and design flexibility. In this study, the whole process of front engine cradle (or front sub-frame) parts development by tube hydro-forming using steel material having tensile strength of 440MPa grade is presented. At the part design stage, it requires feasibility study and process design aided by CAE (Computer Aided Design) to confirm hydro-formability in details. Effects of parameters such as internal pressure, axial feeding and geometry shape on automotive sub-frame by hydro-forming process were carefully investigated. Overall possibility of hydro-formable sub-frame parts could be examined by cross sectional analyses. Moreover, it is essential to ensure the formability of tube material on every forming step such as pre-bending, preforming and hydro-forming. At the die design stage, all the components of prototyping tools are designed and interference with press is examined from the point of geometry and thinning.

• 한국자동차공학회논문집
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• 제16권3호
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• pp.38-43
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• 2008

The hydroforming technology has been spreaded dramatically in automotive industry last 10 years. Itmay cause many advantages to automotive applications in terms of better structural integrity of the parts, lower cost from fewer part count, material saving, weight reduction, lower springback, improved strength and durability and design flexibility. In this study, the whole process of rear sub-frame parts development by tube hydroforming using steel material having tensile strength of 440MPa grade is presented. At the part design stage, it requires feasibility study and process design aided by CAE (Computer Aided Design) to confirm hydroformability in details. Effects of parameters such as internal pressure, axial feeding and geometry shape in automotive rear sub-frame by hydroforming process were carefully investigated. Overall possibility of hydroformable sub-frame parts could be examined by cross sectional analyses. Moreover, it is essential to ensure the formability of tube material on every forming step such as pre-bending, preforming and hydroforming. In addition, all the components of prototyping tool are designed and interference with press is examined from the point of geometry and thinning.

• 한국정밀공학회지
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• 제19권9호
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• pp.74-81
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• 2002

Recently tube hydroforming has been widely applied to the automotive industries due to its several advantages over conventional methods. In this paper, attention is paid to comparison of an implicit and an explicit finite element method widely used for numerical simulation of a hydroforming process. For an explicit FEM, a huge amount of computational time is required because of the very small time increment to solve a quasi-static problem. Hence, when an explicit FEM is used fDr a hydroforming process, it is general to convert the real problem to a virtual problem with a different processing time and mass density by appropriate scaling factor. However it is difficult to figure out how large the scaling should be adopted enough to ignore the dynamic effects and maintain the desired accuracy. In this paper, the comparison of the results obtained from both methods focus on the accuracy of the predicted geometrical shape and the stress with various scaling factors which are applied to analyze hydroforming process of an automobile lower arm.