• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.615-623
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• 2000

The industrial application of hydroforming has a great potential in saying cost and achieving dimensional accuracy in automotive industry presently. The aim of the following article is to investigate the effect of process parameters on hydroformed part. Firstly, we have to investigate the change of mechanical properties for sheet and pipe material according to various radius/thickness ratio(r/t). The change of mechanical properties affects the yield stress more than the total elongation. Increase of yield stress for pipe has a bad influence on formability of hydroforming. Among the roll-forming process, the sizing process didn't change mechanical properties. The process parameters such as the initial pressure, mandrel shape and friction have seriously influenced on formability of hydroforming. Therefore we need to check formability of given material through the FE analysis in the beginning stage of process design and the predicted hydroforming process parameters ate generally a good starting point for the prototype tryout stage. The results of pretending, hydroforming analysis using FE model are good agreement with experimental results.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Heat Treatment
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.165-172
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• 2004

Compared with the hydroforming technology for steel, the hydroforming technology for aluminum has not been actively investigated. Recently, the hydroforming of high strength aluminum tubes has attracted great interest because of its good strength to weight ratio. In this study, front side member (FSM) is fabricated with the hydroforming of aluminum tube and the mechanical properties and dimensional accuracy of the hydroformed FSM is investigated. For hydroforming process, extruded aluminum tubes with ribs to improve the structural rigidity are used. To ensure the mechanical properties, the aluminum tubes are T6 heat-treated before hydroforming.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.24 no.12
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• pp.111-118
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• 2007

Hydroforming is a cost-effective way of shaping malleable metals such as steel into lightweight, structurally stiff and strong pieces. With the increased use of the hydroformed components in automotive and aerospace industries, it is important to know the variations of the mechanical properties in the hydroforming process far the safe and durable design purposes. The principal goal of this paper is to suggest a procedure to evaluate the variations of tensile and fatigue properties before and after a hydroforming process. A miniature specimen, which is 0.2 mm thick and 2.3 mm wide, is devised and tested to measure local mechanical properties. The effects of specimen size, defects, surface roughness, and hydroforming on the tensile and fatigue behaviors are discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2007.10a
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• pp.209-214
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• 2007

This study is concerned with working hardening of bending operation on hydroforming parts. Generally, hydroforming parts having the complicated shape of the automobile, require a 3-dimentional bending operation. This operation involves several variations in the tube which are the thickness, the mechanical characteristics, the hardness, the circumference etc., on original tube. So, we study those variations and the affect on the hydroforming operation and hydroforming parts. We used two methods, one of which was computer simulation and the other the actual test in the plant.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2008.05a
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• pp.325-328
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• 2008

In recent years, developments of light weight vehicle are one of the most important issues in automotive industry. It is important to know the variations of the mechanical properties in the hydro forming process for the safe and durable design purposes. Generally, tube hydroforming process consists of three main processes such as bending, preforming, and hydroforming. It means that the strain hardening histories of final products are nonlinear. In this study, strain hardening behavior during hydroforming has been investigated by hydroforming of engine cradle as a model process. The variation of mechanical properties such as local hardness and strength were used as an index of strain hardening during respective processes. The correlationship between strength and hardness obtained from tensile test has been equivalently converted into correlation between hardness and measured strain.

• 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.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.17-22
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• 2013

Tube hydroforming is a technology that utilizes hydraulic pressure to form a tube into desired shapes inside die cavities. Due to its advantages, such as weight reduction, increased strength, improved quality, and reduced tooling cost, single-layered tube hydroforming is widely used in industry. However in some special applications, it is necessary to produce multi-layered tubular components which have corrosion resistance, thermal resistance, conductivity, and abrasion resistance. In this study, a hollow forming process to fabricate a part from multi-layered tubes for structural purposes is proposed. To accomplish a successful hydroforming process, an analytical model that predicts optimal load path for various parameters such as tube material properties, thickness of tubes, diameter of holes and the number of holes was developed. Tubular hydroforming experiments to fabricate a hollow part were performed and the optimal loading path developed by the analytical model was successfully verified. The results show that the proposed hydroforming process can effectively produce hollow parts with multi-layered tube without defects such as wrinkling or fracture.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.60 no.1
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• pp.91-110
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• 2016

Tube hydroforming (THF) under pulsating hydraulic pressures is a novel technique that applies pulsating hydraulic pressures that are periodically increased to deform tubular materials. The deformation behaviours of tubes in pulsating THF may differ compared to those in conventional non-pulsating THF due to the pulsating hydraulic pressures. The equivalent stress-strain relationship of metal materials is an ideal way to describe the deformation behaviours of the materials in plastic deformation. In this paper, the equivalent stress-strain relationships of SS304 tubes in pulsating hydroforming are determined based on experiments and simulation of free hydraulic bulging (FHB), and compared with those of SS304 tubes in non-pulsating THF and uniaxial tensile tests (UTT). The effect of the pulsation parameters, including amplitude and frequency, on the equivalent stress-strain relationships is investigated to reveal the plastic deformation behaviours of tubes in pulsating hydroforming. The results show that the deformation behaviours of tubes in pulsating hydroforming can be well described by the equivalent stress-stain relationship obtained by the proposed method. The amplitude and frequency of pulsating hydraulic pressure have distinct effects on the equivalent stress-strain relationships-the equivalent stress becomes augmented and the formability is enhanced with the increase of the pulsation amplitude and frequency.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.604-614
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• 2000

In this paper, the mechanical characteristics and fundamental mechanism of a roll-formed tube during the hydroforming process are investigated in order to obtain the ewly localization of the tube hydroforming skills which are the core production techniques for the super light weight and high safety of the car body. Also, the theoretical influences of the material variables and the processes on the formability in the tube hydroforming are studied. In addition, the techniques to evaluate the forming limit of the bulging process of a tube are developed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.154-157
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• 2008

It is important to know the variations of the mechanical properties in the hydroforming process for the safe and durable design purposes. In this study, strain hardening behavior during hydroforming has been investigated by hydroforming of engine cradle as a model process. The variation of mechanical properties such as local hardness and flow stress were used as an index of strain hardening during respective processes. By using the inter-relationships between hardness-flow stress-effective strain at variable pre-strains, the strain hardening behavior during hydroforming has been successfully analyzed. The comparison of predicted hardness with measured hardness confirmed that the methodology used in this study was feasible and the strain hardening behavior can be quantitatively estimated.