Aluminum extrusion with a deformable die
نویسندگان
چکیده
In aluminum extrusion, a work-piece (billet) is pressed through a die with an opening that closely resembles the desired shape of a profile. By this process, long profiles with an enormous variety of cross-sections can be produced to serve different markets such as building, construction and transport industry. When the shape of a profile does not conform to the specifications defined by the customer, it is considered as scrap. The reason for the shape deviations may be related to unknown aluminum flow through the die or unknown deformation of the die. Subsequently the die requires correction or replacement. Here, not only aluminum but also time and energy are lost. Currently this is the state of the art in extrusion die design. Dies are designed by so called trial and error. The material flow in the die and the deformation of the die can also be predicted by numerical simulations. Computer capacities are more and more increasing and improvements on finite element methods with respect to mesh management, material modeling and solution of the systems of equations are going on. This means that in the traditional trial and error design process extrusion trials can be replaced with numerical simulations. This saves time, energy and the amount of scrap. The part in the die opening that determines the shape of the profile is called the bearing. At the entrance of the bearing the aluminum flow has to round a sharp corner with a very small radius. Discretization of this radius will increase the total number of degrees of freedom in the simulation. Since a sharp change in the flow direction occurs at the corner, an approximation must be applied which avoids material loss and locking. As an approximation the corner is modeled by a single node to which a conditional normal is specified. The direction of this normal is determined such that the material flow is conserved. This approximation gives good results also in terms of extrusion force. It can be applied to different types of elements and it consumes little additional time in the preprocessing stage of the numerical simulation. Three different methods are followed to simulate the material flow and the die deformation: a decoupled, a coupled and a semi-coupled method. In the decoupled method, the material flow and die deformation simulations are solved separately. Although it gives a good prediction of the extrusion force and v vi die deformation, …
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