Study On Numerical Simulation And Experimental Research Of Sheet Metal HydroForming

Sheet Metal stamping holds a very important status in automobile manufacturing. Most automobile panels are formed by this technique, and the period for its mould manufacturing highly affects the cost of the automobile and the development period of new products. Traditional design of molds is based on lots of simplifications and assumption, and mostly depends on the experience of workers and trial & error in order to assure the quality of the product, so the method not only costs much time and money, but also can not keep the quality of products.As a kind of soft mold forming technique, Hydroforming adopts fluid medium but not mould to transfer load. The method has a lot of good qualities, such as simple structure, broad application area, low cost and high forming precision, most important of all, it can improve the forming limit of sheet metal and is applicable to the big metal sheet production with complex shape and little batch. All these advantages make it extensively used in the fields of aerospace, aviation, automobile and home appliances.In this paper, the new application and development of the hydroforming technology in domestic and international are briefly introduced, also in which the numerical simulation of sheet metal forming is been discussed, and the significance and the prospective application of the sheet metal hydroforming are pointed out. In order to explore the deforming in the sheet metal hydroforming, numerical simulations of a box forming process is carried out based on the software PAM-STAMP2G. In the analyses, the forming parameters, which include the hydraulic pressure and the friction coefficient between the mould and the metal sheet, are changed to study their effect on the deforming. With the Japanese company ANINO's hydroforming equipments, the experimental research of the box forming is done to compare the results from the two methods, and also to prove the availability of the numerical simulation on the software PAM-STAMP2G. This paper presents a way, which is on the basis of numerical simulation on the software PAM-STAMP2G, to design and optimize the mold, and take the designation of the mold as an example to explain it in details.