SBIR-STTR Award

Tube hydroforming is an innovative technique for manufacturing structural parts using hollow tubes. This process offers many advantages over the conventional forming and welding of multiple sheet metal parts to come up with a single structure. These advantages include part design flexibility, part consolidation, reduced weight, reduced number and complexity in production steps, and reduced tooling complexity. Tube hydroforming of aluminum extrusions takes advantage of the lower weight of aluminum compared to steel, and shape flexibility offered by extrusion process. This project aims at demonstrating the feasibility of developing a FEA based software for computer simulation of the tube hydroforming process. The software capabilities should include handling large plastic deformations and complex contact geometries encountered in tube hydroforming. In addition to simulating various forming conditions, the unique feature of the software will be the closed-loop control of process variables. Implementation of the software will eliminate or substantially reduce the physical prototyping phase and leads to major reduction of time and cost for producing tube-hydroformed parts. The proposed research aims at simulation of tube hydroforming of aluminum alloys suitable for a broad spectrum of applications, especially net-shape fabrication of aerospace parts. Over the long term, the scientific developments from this project will provide a basis to expand "design choices" of structural aluminum components through efficient processing routes. And therefore it can lead to better exploitation of the tech-nological potential of these materials and processes

Tube hydroforming is an innovative technique for manufacturing structural parts using hollow tubes. This process offers many advantages over the conventional forming and welding of multiple sheet metal parts to come up with a single structure. These advantages include part design flexibility, part consolidation, reduced weight, reduced number and complexity in production steps, and reduced tooling complexity. Tube hydroforming of aluminum extrusions takes advantage of the lower weight of aluminum compared to steel, and shape flexibility offered by extrusion process. This project objective is to develop a FEA based software for computer simulation of the tube hydroforming process. The software capabilities should include handling large plastic deformations and complex contact geometries encountered in tube hydroforming. In addition to simulating various forming conditions, the unique feature of the software will be the closed-loop control of process variables. Implementation of the software will eliminate or substantially reduce the physical prototyping phase and leads to major reduction of time and cost for producing tube-hydroformed parts