Formability of Advanced High Strength Steel Tubes in Tube Bending and Hydroforming
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FORMABILITY OF ADVANCED HIGH STRENGTH STEEL TUBES IN TUBE BENDING AND HYDROFORMING by Mikhail Sorine A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfillment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2007 © Mikhail Sorine 2007 I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract An investigation of the tube hydroforming process is conducted in order to understand the effect of pre- bending operation on formability in tube hydroforming and assess the application of the newly developed Extended Stress-Based Forming Limit Curve (XSFLC) method to the prediction of failure in tube hydroforming. Two sets of experiments on straight tube hydroforming and pre-bent tube hydroforming were conducted on tubes manufactured from three steel grades, namely DDQ, HSLA350 and DP600, which represent mild steel, high strength steel and advanced high strength steel, respectively. All tubes had the same outer diameter of 76.2 mm and the same nominal wall thickness of 1.8 mm, which enabled direct assessment of the effect of material strength on formability in tube hydroforming. For pre-bent tube hydroforming the tubes were bent to 90 degrees before hydroforming. The effect of the increased axial compressive load, termed the end-feed load, on tube formability in hydroforming was investigated. All experiments were simulated using the explicit dynamic finite element code LS-DYNA in order to investigate the accuracy of numerical predictions in the tube hydroforming process. The numerical simulations, validated using the experimental data, were then utilized to investigate the prediction of necking in straight and pre-bent tube hydroforming using the XSFLC method. The formability, burst pressure and corner-fill expansion in hydroforming of the pre-bent tubes was considerably less than that exhibited in hydroforming of the straight tubes. In both straight and pre-bent tube hydroforming, the application of the end-feed load postponed failure and significantly increased internal pressure and corner-fill expansion at burst. The finite element models accurately predicted the results of the tube bending and tube hydroforming experiments. The straight tube hydroforming simulations, validated using the experimental results, enabled accurate prediction of the failure location and tube internal pressure at the onset of necking using the XSFLC method. In order to obtain the XSFLC for each alloy, strain-based FLCs were calibrated using the results of tube free expansion tests. The results of the tube free expansion tests and corresponding numerical simulations also served to validate the tube material properties for the FE models. Straight tube hydroforming simulations were utilized to investigate the effect of friction between the tube and the die on the hydroforming process parameters and necking predictions using the XSFLC method. The validated pre-bent tube hydroforming simulations captured the trends in the increase of tube internal pressure at the onset of necking with the increase of end-feed load using the XSFLC method. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Michael Worswick, for an opportunity to work on this project, his guidance through the research work and his help in setting up a positive start for my research and engineering career in Canada. I am grateful to Michael for his patience at the beginning, during my transition period, which was not easy for me. I would also like to thank Hari Simha for his advice and collaboration in the XSFLC part of my research work. I thank Dino Oliveira for his help with the experimental work and for editing my first technical paper. I wish to thank Rassin Grantab, Alex Bardelcik and Bruce Williams for their help in the labs. I would also like to acknowledge technical support from the lab technicians Ekhard Budziareck, Howard Barker, Richard Gordon, Tom Gawel and Andy Barber. I would like to thank my friend Oleg and all my office-mates. I am grateful for the financial support provided to me by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the President of the University of Waterloo Scholarship. My research project was made possible through the support of the Auto21 project, the Canadian Auto21 Networks of Centers of Excellence, Dofasco Inc., Eagle Precision Technologies, D.A. Stuart, Nova Tube, Stelco and General Motors of Canada. I would like to thank Isadora van Riemsdijk and Bruce Farrand of Dofasco Inc. for their enthusiast support in every aspect of our collaboration within my research work and for sharing their ideas with me. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their understanding and my friends outside the university, who made my transition into Canadian period of my life smoother and much more enjoyable. iv To the memory of a metal forming specialist, a great man and my grandfather Grigory Iosifovich Khesin v Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction ...............................................................................................................................1 1.1 Tube material and its characterization ......................................................................................4 1.1.1 Advanced High Strength steels.............................................................................................4 1.1.2 Tube material property determination ..................................................................................5 1.2 Tube bending ............................................................................................................................7 1.2.1 Rotary-draw tube bending ....................................................................................................9 1.2.2 Tube bending simulations...................................................................................................11 1.2.3 Tube pre-bending effect in hydroforming ..........................................................................12 1.3 Tube hydroforming .................................................................................................................12 1.3.1 Straight tube hydroforming ................................................................................................14 1.3.2 Pre-bent tube hydroforming................................................................................................16 1.3.3 Effect of material properties in tube hydroforming............................................................17 1.3.4 Effect of friction in tube hydroforming ..............................................................................19 1.3.5 Load schedule design effect in tube hydroforming ............................................................20 1.4 Forming Limit Curves.............................................................................................................22 1.4.1 Strain-Based forming Limit Curve.....................................................................................22 1.4.2 Stress-Based Forming Limit Curve ....................................................................................24 1.4.3 Extended Stress-Based Forming Limit Curve ....................................................................25 1.4.4 Strain-based FLC for tube material ....................................................................................26 1.5 Current research......................................................................................................................30 Chapter 2 Experimental procedure...........................................................................................................32 2.1 Material characterization ........................................................................................................32 2.2 Tube bending experiments......................................................................................................35 2.2.1 Tube bending process parameters.......................................................................................37 2.2.2 Tube bending sequence ......................................................................................................38 2.3 Tube hydroforming experiments.............................................................................................39 2.3.1 Tube hydroforming sequence .............................................................................................41 2.3.2 Process parameters and load scheduling.............................................................................41 2.4 Tube sample preparation.........................................................................................................44 2.5 Twist compression test............................................................................................................45 Chapter 3 Numerical simulations.............................................................................................................48 3.1 Material models ......................................................................................................................48 vi 3.2 Tube bending model ...............................................................................................................51 3.2.1 Finite element discretization...............................................................................................51