Forming limit diagrams for tubes with non-uniform thickness in hydro-bulging

Abstract

Tube hydroforming (THF) is a unique forming technique, which can transform metal tubes into complex hollow parts using hydraulic fluid as the forming medium. The initial non-uniform thickness of as-received practical tubes significantly affects their formability in the hydroforming process. A forming limit diagram (FLD), also called as the forming limit curve (FLC), is often adopted to evaluate the forming behaviour of sheet metals in plastic forming processes to avoid forming failures. The purposes of this research are fivefold, namely to establish the FLCs of tubular blanks with varied initial thickness deviations in tensile and compressive strain states by means of finite element (FE) modelling of THF, to construct a non-uniform geometric model for practical tubes, to analyse the impact of initial thickness deviation on the FLCs, to clarify the differences in the FLCs obtained using three different instability criteria, and to validate the proposed non-uniform geometric model by conducting hydro-bulging experiments. Results show that it is possible to accurately predict the FLCs of practical tubes with initial non-uniform thicknesses using FE simulation combined with the proposed non-uniform geometric model. We found that the displacement of FLCs occurred in the major- and minor-strain coordinates because the thickness is initially not uniform; however, no significant discrepancies were observed in the FLCs obtained using the three instability criteria. The proposed approach, which combines FE simulation with a non-uniform geometric model, can be easily employed to predict the ultimate strains of tubes with initial non-uniform thicknesses in THF to avoid forming defects.