Optimization on the cold drawing process of 6063 aluminium tubes

To obtain the T832 material behaviour, 6063-T4 tubes need to be cold drawn before artificial aging to enhance their mechanical properties. Since a high area reduction is required, multiple drawing passes are generally necessary to avoid fracture of tubes during the drawing process. These several steps need a time consuming process which could be reduced by optimization. The optimization of the tools geometry has been done through a finite element model with the objective of reducing the maximum stress level to draw tubes in one pass. Based on the optimum design, a new tool was built and acceptable accordance was observed between experiments and numerical results. Crown Copyright (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.