Rotary Swaging Forming Process of Tube Workpieces

Abstract

With the fast development of manufacturing industry, rotary swaging technology is applied more and more widely in automobile, aviation and aerospace industries, due to its advantages such as saving materials, reducing lead time and improving product quality. Rotary swaging technology is mainly used to fabricate tubes, rods or act as preprocessing of other process. For instance, it can conduct necking of the tube ends before tube hydroforming process and internal gear machining process. In this paper, finite-element simulations using Forge 2011 3D has been carried out to investigate the rotary swaging process of tubes. According to the swaging method and presence of mandrel, rotary swaging process of tubes includes four categories, infeed method without mandrel, infeed method with mandrel, recess method without mandrel and recess method with mandrel. Metal flow and stress state of those four kinds of method are investigated. For the infeed method without mandrel, the metal mainly flows radially at the sinking zone. At the sizing zone, the metal flows axially with small velocity. When a mandrel is used, the axial flow velocity at the sizing zone gets larger. For the recess method, the main deformation area is the forging zone. The metal mainly flows radially at the forging zone with large velocity. Experiments have been carried out. Discrepancy of the tube thickness between the experiments and simulations for the infeed swaging without mandrel is less than 1.1%.