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Material characteristics evaluation for DC04-welded tube hydroforming

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Abstract

Tube hydroforming (THF) technology is widely applied especially in the automotive and aircraft industries. Material characteristics of tubular workpieces should be evaluated in terms of bending and THF processes. A mathematical model, which combines the assumption of the elliptical contour of a bulged wall and the prediction equation of wall thickness, was designed to analyze the THF process and to obtain the strain–stress relationship of tubes. Material characteristics of a DC04-welded tube were obtained by using a self-designed THF test machine. Considering the effects of pre-work hardening, the material strain–stress relationships of the tube and original sheet blank were discussed. An approximate determination method was proposed to obtain the stress–strain curve of the tube by using the curve of the original sheet blank and the hardness of the tube and sheet blank. A suitable constitutive equation with pre-work hardening was applied to the DC04-welded tubes through simulation and experimental methods.

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Data availability

The authors guarantee no restriction of availability of data, material, and code.

Abbreviations

\(L\) :

Length of the bulging region

\(R\) :

Initial radius of the tube

\({t}_{0}\) :

Initial wall thickness

\({t}_{b}\) :

Thickness of point b

\({h}_{i}\) :

Bulging height

\({R}_{a}\) :

Radius of the elliptic contour in the x-axis

\({R}_{b}\) :

Radius of the elliptic contour in the y-axis

\({R}_{r}\) :

Radius of the die

\({P}_{i}\) :

Internal bulging pressure

\({P}_{\varphi }\) :

Meridian radius of curvature

\({\sigma }_{ST}\) :

Yield strength of the tube

\({\sigma }_{SB}\) :

Yield strength of the sheet blank

\({\sigma }_{\varphi }\) :

Stress in meridian direction

\({\sigma }_{\theta }\) :

Stress in circumferential direction

\({\sigma }_{t}\) :

Stress in normal direction

\(\tilde{\sigma }\) :

Equivalent stress

\({\varepsilon }_{\varphi }\) :

Strains in meridian direction

\({\varepsilon }_{\theta }\) :

Strains in circumferential direction

\(T\left({x}_{i},{y}_{i}\right)\) :

Tangent point coordinates of the bulging region contour and mold contour

\({\upvarepsilon }_{t}\) :

Strains in normal direction

\(\overline{\varepsilon }\) :

Equivalent strain

\({\rho }_{\theta }\) :

Circumferential radius of curvature

\({H}_{T}\) :

Vickers hardness of the tube

\({H}_{B}\) :

Vickers hardness of the sheet blank

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mr. Kai Yang, Mr. Yisheng Zhang, Mr. Xiaowei Ma, and Dr. Ningyu Ben for providing detailed experimental data. The authors gratefully thank the Instrument Analysis Center of the Xi’an Jiaotong University for assistance with the SEM operation.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFB1106400), by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51875441), and by the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (Nos. xtr012019004 and zrzd2017027).

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  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Liqun Niu, Qi Zhang & Bin Han

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  1. Liqun Niu
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  2. Qi Zhang
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All authors contributed equally to the work.

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Correspondence to Qi Zhang.

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Niu, L., Zhang, Q. & Han, B. Material characteristics evaluation for DC04-welded tube hydroforming. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 119, 7075–7088 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-08527-9

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