Design, fabrication, and use of a new reconfigurable discrete die for forming tubular parts

Abstract

In recent years, several research works have been performed on the application of reconfigurable discrete dies (RDD) for forming sheet metals. Due to the rapid changing of these dies, they attracted the attention of flexible manufacturing systems. Meanwhile, only flat sheet metals were examined, and no research work has been reported on the application of the mentioned dies for tubular parts. In this paper, a new RDD for spinning tubular parts were designed and fabricated. The results obtained in this research illustrated that hollow axisymmetric parts could be produced using this type of die, and that this technique leads to the production of tubular parts with desired accuracy and quality. The strain distribution diagrams of formed samples showed that the length of samples decreases and the wall thickness of them increases after forming. Increase in wall thickness in the middle of the tube is more than the sides and decrease in length in the sides is more than the middle. The twisting deformation increases as the depth of forming area increases. The dimension accuracy of formed samples is acceptable by taking into consideration the likely errors.