Numerical studies on the production of variable thickness aluminium tubes for transportation purposes

Nowadays application of light alloys like aluminium in automobile industry has found a striking role. Higher strength over weight ratio which causes lower fuel consumption seems to be the first reason. Also some other reasons like ease of manufacturing, protection against corrosion and ease of recycling are other motivations for car designers to use various aluminium alloys as much as possible. Due to lack of variable thickness tubes, they have not found a lot of applications in the car component design. This paper aims to introduce these types of tubes to automotive industry. Also these tubes are one of the essential elements in the complementary processes like tube hydroforming and cause ease of production and decreasing risk of scrap in manufacturing cycles. Tube drawing is one of the mostly used methods for reducing thickness and/or diameter of tubes which, can be classified in four categories like sinking (without mandrel), float mandrel, fixed mandrel and ultrasonically moving mandrel. This paper presents numerical studies that have been done on the drawing tubes with variable thickness. The influence of process variables on material thinning and formability in 63.5mm outer diameter, 2.62 mm wall thickness AA6063 aluminium alloy tube, were investigated and optimised. Validation of the numerical simulation on the different parameters setting will be performed by comparing the final shape and deformation, measured from the tested part. Acceptable agreement between numerical and experimental results was observed.