Hydroforming of flanged tubular part

Abstract

Tube hydroforming is the technology that utilizes hydraulic pressure to form a tube into desired shapes inside die cavities. Recently, tube hydroforming technology draws attentions of automotive industries due to its advantages such as weight reduction, increased strength, improved quality and reduced tooling cost. Hydroformed automotive parts used as structural components in vehicle body frame or subframe often have to be structurally joined at some point. Therefore it is useful if the hydroformed automotive parts can be given a localized attachment flange. In this study, a tube hydroformed product which has flange has been formed at various processing conditions. To accomplish successful flange hydroforming process, thorough investigation on proper combination of process parameters such as internal hydraulic pressure and tool geometry has been performed. For the process design FE analysis was performed with Dynaform 5.5. With optimized die parting angle and circumferential expansion ratio, hydroforming experiments to form flange were performed and forming characteristics at various process conditions were analyzed. The results show that flanged parts can be successfully produced by tube hydroforming process.