Extrusion Die Design and Process Simulation of High Strength Aluminium Alloy

Abstract

Aluminium alloy 7075 is an excellent metal with the features of high strength and light weight. The solid extruded parts of AL 7075 are commonly used in the structure members of airplanes and bicycles. The seamless tubes of AL 7075 are also used, while tubes with welding line (seamed) are mainly made by the other types of aluminium alloy. This research is focused on the extrusion die design and process simulation of the rectangular seamed AL 7075 tubes. A new die design concept is proposed to increase the welding pressure in the chamber to solve the problem of poor welding ability of AL 7075. The key points of welding ability improvement are the higher welding pressure, the crucial billet temperature, and the extrusion speed. The designed extrusion die should have some features to control the material flow and achieve the higher welding pressure. In this paper, not only use the traditional die bearing and the welding chamber, but also add a conical guiding chamber (specified with chamber height and width) to improve the material flow control. Finite element method is used to simulate the extrusion process and evaluate the effect of die design parameters for a seamed rectangular 7075 tube extrusion. The die stress should be considered carefully because of increasing the welding pressure also increases the die stress. Taguchi method is used to obtain the optimum combination of die design parameters to get higher welding pressure and keep the die stress at a reasonable low level. The method proposed in this paper is able to increase the welding pressure with the cost of reasonable die stress.