EXPERIMENTAL AND FINITE ELEMENT SIMULATION OF GAS PRESSURE BLOW FORMING

This paper describes the results of finite element simulation and experimental of gas pressure blow forming of a sheet from 2024 aluminum alloy, in hemispheres The material which has been studied in this paper is the commercial aluminum alloy 2024-T3, which was processed thermomechanically to obtain a fine grained structure before gas pressure blow forming The disks from 2024 aluminum alloy processed thermomechamcally, with 49 mm diameter and with 0,67 mm thickness were formed superplastically in hemispheres at the constant forming pressures of 7,5 bar and 7,8 bar, at temperature of 460 C The temporal change of pole height of the hemispheres has been measured during a deformation process The thickness distribution of hemispheres walls after deformation has been measured At all the constant forming pressures, the smallest thickness of hemispheres walls were obtained in the pole of these The results of hemisphere forming simulation revealed that the gas pressure blow-forming can be used in simple processes such as bulge forming The diferences between experimental and FE simulation results were insignificantly