Surface roughening analysis of cold drawn tube based on macro-micro coupling finite element method

The aim of this paper is to research the inner surface roughness evolution of AA6061 rectangular tube in cold drawing process. The micro-scale finite element model with initial surface roughness and reasonable model size was created firstly. Then the micro-scale finite element analysis (FEA) of surface roughness evolution was conducted based on the macro-scale analysis of tube drawing process. The comparisons between simulation and experiment results indicate the validity of the macro-micro coupling FEA method. To improve the surface quality further, the influence of micro-scale material properties (e.g., grain size) on the surface roughness evolution in the plastic deformation was investigated. For simplification, the uniaxial tension model was adopted. The research results illustrate that small initial surface roughness, fine grains and lower Taylor factor may be beneficial to improve the surface quality after plastic deformation. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.