Simulation of Shear Spinning Process for Pressure Vessel Components

Abstract

Spinning process for the medium- and small-lot production of axisymmetric components has many advantages, such as smaller deformation force, simpler tool-and-die design, and lower investment in equipment, over conventional forming processes. It has been widely used in aerospace, energy and defense industry. This paper presents a 3-D elastoplastic finite element (FE) model for the simulation of the shear spinning process, in order to study deformation behaviour and design proper process parameters for the spinning process. The proposed model has the following characteristics: i) a shell element is used to mesh the contact pairs between the workpiece (a metal blank) and the tool sets (a pressing roller and a mandrel); ii) the offset thickness of the shell element is considered during contact treatment; iii) the movement of the roller and the fixing of the central blank and mandrel are treated as the boundary condition; iv) relative movement between the roller and the blank is treated as a spiral feeding process. FEM simulations for shear spinning with aluminum have been implemented, using a dynamic explicit scheme, on ANSYS/LS-DYNA software. Spinning force, thickness distribution and stress distribution have been studied under various roller feeds and inclined angles of mandrel. The simulation results have provided good confirmation with the experiments.