Study on the Effect of Internal Pressure and Axial Feed in Tube Hydrostatic Forming Process of T-shaped Joints

Tubular products, which are hydrostatically formed, have proven their wide application in many industries, especially in the automotive—motorcycle and aerospace industries. Compared with other manufacturing processes, tube hydrostatic forming (THF) provides parts with better quality and lower production costs. In order to obtain parts that satisfy design requirements such as geometric shapes, material thickness distribution, mechanical properties and stiffness, the study of the influence of technological parameters such as internal fluid pressure is and axial feed is extremely important and urgent. Numerical simulation of the process of tube hydrostatic forming to manufacture T-shaped joints through finite element (FE) modeling on Abaqus software helps scientists have a more intuitive view of the ability to create product quality as designed, as well as optimizing input parameters, output parameters in this process. As a result, it will save more money and time in the trial and error phase, and bring quality products to market faster. This study aims to find the combination of THF parameters that maximizes the height of the protrusion and minimizes the thinning ratio of the expansion zone. The results obtained from numerical simulation will be used to develop THF experiment and compare the results from the simulation with the experiment later. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.