Advances in Tube Hydroforming - An Enabling Technology for Low-Mass Vehicle Manufacturing-Material, Lubrication, Loading, Simulation Issues, and Alternatives

The tube hydroforming process (THF) has recently found a wide application opportunity in the automotive industry, and is of increasing interest to other industries as well. The increased interest stems from the fact that, through the THF process, manufacturers are able to produce complex, consolidated,lightweight parts with reduced number of post-processing than through alternative metal forming techniques.In order to fully realize the benefits of this technology, various aspects have been under investigation in academia and industry world-wide. In this paper, effect of loading path, incoming material variation, and lubrication on the robustness of the hydroforming process and final part specifications are summarized based on previous experimental and computational work. In addition, the simulation of hydroforming and examples are presented in comparison with experimental findings. Briefly, results emphasized the importance of the loading path design whereas material variation within the experimentally tested range was not found to be significantly effective on the final part specifications. Selection of a lubricant for hydroforming of a frame rail part was presented demonstrating several aspects of lubrication selection methodology. Results of friction experiments show that only thickness, axial feeding, and force measurements are good indications of lubricant performance as these are found to be strongly discriminative.