Development of residual stresses by infeed rotary swaging of steel tubes

Abstract

Additionally to the achievable tight geometrical tolerances, rotary swaging can influence intrinsic material properties by work hardening and residual stresses generation. Although residual stresses should be usually avoided, they can be used on purpose to improve the performance properties of a produced part. To find prospective process settings, 2D FEM simulation of the rotary swaging process was developed and revealed the development of residual stresses distributions in E355 steel tubes in the whole longitudinal section. Besides the closing time, also geometric features of the dies were varied. It was found that the closing time affects the residual stresses significantly at the surface, but not in the depth of the part. By shortening the calibration zone, the axial tensile residual stresses near the outer surface could be lowered, while compressive residual stresses near the inner surface remained almost unaffected. By applying a higher die angle, the tensile axial residual stresses were increased while reducing the compressive axial residual stresses. Experimental investigations of residual stresses were performed by X-ray diffraction which revealed a good agreement between simulation results and physical measurements. With these findings, the rotary swaging process can be optimized for shaping residual stresses profiles to improve the performance properties of the produced parts.