Fabrication of small size inner spiral ribbed copper tube by fluid mandrel drawing

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the development of ultra-small inner spiral ribbed copper tubes with high-quality heat transfer. Since the demand for the ultra-small tubes in electrical appliances is currently high and will be greater in the future, the technology employed must enable the production of inner spiral ribbed fine tubes with various features, such as small size, high quality, high functionality, and low processing cost so as to meet the increasing demand. The conventional production method is suitable for large tubes with high drawability but is unsuitable for fabrication of long ultra-small tubes because of the difficulty to manufacture both an ultra-small spiral ribbed mandrel and a floating plug. This research paper has proposed four drawing methods as follows: tube sinking, water, oil, and wax as mandrels and presented the comparison of seven parameters, i.e., drawing stress ratio, wall thickness ratio, ribbed base width ratio, ribbed tip width ratio, ribbed height ratio, ribbed pitch ratio, and ribbed spiral angle ratio. It was found that tube sinking was unfit for making the ultra-small inner spiral ribbed copper tubes due to the resulting high ratio of wall thickness. The results of all the parameters were similar in the cases of oil and wax. Despite less impressive outcomes, water was easily removed from the inner spiral ribbed copper tube compared to oil and wax. Thus, the tube drawing using water as mandrel was most suitable for the production of the inner spiral ribbed copper tube.