Experimental and simulation study of conical parts hydroforming by obtaining suitable fluid pressure

One of the processes that is recently used in forming of metallic parts is hydroforming. Conical parts are among the most frequently used parts in industries, especially in military industries. Forming of these components by traditional methods is difficult and normally defects appear on the parts. To overcome this limitation, in this research the production of conical parts by hydroforming process has been studied experimentally and performing simulation. At first, the forming pressure and the applied fluid pressure path were investigated and some rules have been extracted to obtain the suitable pressure in the forming of conical parts. Based on the rules, a flowchart has been developed and by programming it using Python software, the suitable pressure is thus obtained with minimal time and cost. In fact, these rules are applicable for conical parts with different dimensions. To obtain the rules for developing the flowchart, the influence of pressure, sheet diameter and different dimensions of half cones on thinning of the part was investigated. The results showed that despite the independent effect of each parameter on changes in thinning, in all the studies the maximum thinning was increased with increasing pressure and then decreased.