Material modeling for multistage tube hydroforming process simulation

Abstract

The Aerospace industries of the 21st century demand the use of cutting edge materials and manufacturing technology. New manufacturing methods such as hydroforming are relatively new and are being used to produce commercial vehicles. This process allows for part consolidation and reducing the number of parts in an assembly compared to conventional methods such as stamping, press forming and welding of multiple components. Hydroforming in particular, provides an endless opportunity to achieve multiple crosssectional shapes in a single tube. A single tube can be pre-bent and subsequently hydroformed to create an entire component assembly instead of welding many smaller sheet metal sections together. The knowledge of tube hydroforming for aerospace materials is not well developed yet, thus new methods are required to predict and study the formability, and the critical forming limits for aerospace materials. In order to have a better understanding of the formability and the mechanical properties of aerospace materials, a novel online measurement approach based on free expansion test is developed using a 3D automated deformation measurement system (Aramis®) to extract the coordinates of the bulge profile during the test. These coordinates are used to calculate the circumferential and longitudinal curvatures, which are utilized to determine the effective stresses and effective strains at different stages of the tube hydroforming process. In the second step, two different methods, a weighted average method and a new hardening function are utilized to define accurately the true stress-strain curve for post-necking regime of different aerospace alloys, such as inconel 718 (IN 718), stainless steel 321 (SS 321) and titanium (Ti6Al4V). The flow curves are employed in the simulation of the dome height test, which is utilized for generating the forming limit diagrams (FLDs). Then, the effect of stress triaxiality, the stress concentration factor and the effective plastic strain on the nucleation, growth and coalescence of voids are investigated through a new user material for burst prediction during tube hydroforming. A numerical procedure for both plasticity and fracture is developed and implemented into 3D explicit commercial finite element software (LS-DYNA) through a new user material subroutine. The FLDs and predicted bursting pressure results are compared to the experimental data to validate the models. Finally, the new user material model is used to predict the bursting point of some real tube hydroforming parts such as round to square and round to V parts. Then, the predicted bursting pressure results are compared to the experimental data to validate the models in real and multistep tube hydroforming processes.

Date	8 Jan 2015
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Henri Champliaud (Supervisor), Javad Gholipour Baradari (Co-supervisor) & Augustin Gakwaya (Co-supervisor)