• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.75-83
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• 2002

Recently, the hydroforming process is widely applied to the automotive industry and rapidly spreaded to other industries. In this paper, An implicit finite element formulation for simulating axisymmetric tube hydroforming processes is performed. In order to describe normal anisotropy of the tube, Hill's non-quadratic yield function is employed. The frictional contact between die and tube and the frictionless contact between tube and fluid are considered using the mesh-normal vectors computed from the finite element mesh of the tube. The complete set of the governing relations comprising equilibrium and interfacial equations is linearized for Newton-Raphson procedure. In order to verify the validity of the developed finite element formulation, the axisymmetric tube bulge test is simulated and the simulation results are compared with experimental measurements. In a simulation of stepped circular tube hydroforming processes, an optimal hydraulic pressure curve is pursued by considering simultaneously internal pressures and axial forces.