Numerical study on the effect of input variations on bulge height in hot tube metal gas forming process

Hot metal gas forming of tubes can be used in various industries such as automotive and aerospace industries. In this process tube is formed at elevated temperatures, by using gas instead of fluid pressure. Lower required pressure and low power are its advantages in comparison to hydroforming process. In this paper, a hot metal gas bulging process of an aluminum alloy tube has been investigated by finite element method. In addition, The HMGF process was simulated by ) Dynamic, Temp-Disp, Explicit( because of the temperature distribution along the tube length, whereas temperature was simplified and assumed to be uniform in analytical method. The bulge height parameter was investigated by changing the input variations such as internal pressure, outer diameter, die entry radius, initial tube length and initial tube wall thickness in numerical method. The numerical result shows that the input variations have significant effects on tube bulge height in this process.