Experimental Study of Hydroforming Process for Anisotropic Thin Metal Sheets

The design and shaping of thin metal sheets with desirable characteristics has received notable attention in a multitude of industrial fields, including automotive and aerospace. However, the temperature factor related to the modeling procedure remains unresolved due to the deformations caused by isothermal processing, which severely compromise the anisotropy and ductility of the final material. In this context, we propose to characterize the rheological response of the material. A hot hydraulic swelling device is used to perform various swelling tests at different temperatures. The numerical simulation is done on a finite element calculation tool (ABAQUS). In the first part of this study, we performed uniaxial tensile tests at different temperatures in order to identify the parameters that influence the shaping. Then, we try to introduce the influence of the shape. We performed elliptical and circular bulge tests at room temperature and analyzed the results. We used the inverse method to identify and optimize the strain hardening and anisotropy parameters of the materials in the elliptical and circular bulge tests, using Swift’s strain hardening law and Hill 48 elasticity criterion. Through the tensile tests we were able to deduce the parameters characterizing the behavior of the material. The effect of temperature is apparent in terms of energy gain during the shaping of thin structures. The variation in matrix shape shows that the stricture is localized to the free part of the circular and elliptical matrix of the specimens.