Development Of Experimental System For Superplastic Micro-extrusion And Simulation Research

Superplastic micro-extrusion forming technology has many advantages such as low forming temperature, low extrusion force, high performance of products and so on. It has an affirmatory applied prospect with the increasing demand for micro parts in recent years. Therefore, it is necessary to research this technology and develop a superplastic micro-extrusion system for micro parts forming.The trend in micro-production system development and the key technical matters in this system were analyzed. The gross structure of superplastic micro-extrusion system was designed according to the functional requirements and qualification of the system and its subsystem. The key parts in each subsystem were analyzed and designed elaborately and the experiment device was carried out at last.Based on the principle of thermomechanical coupled FEM, the superplastic micro-extrusion process was simulated by use of commercial FE software. The results of temperature field, stress and strain field in the forming process were carried out and verified by experiment. The result indicated that the forming temperature has the most important effect on this process, but the forming temperature was influenced by some process parameters such as extrusion speed, preheating temperature of blanks and dies. Material has been realilzed the forming of superplastic micro-extrusion, and the temperature can be stable in the specific range. The results of simulation provide a theoretic basis for parameters selection and optimization in superplastic micro-extrusion technology.According to the experimental requirements of superplastic micro-extrusion and controlling models features of its system, a application software package in which parameters, output graphs and visit database can be realized was compiled by means of some softwares such as Microsoft VB 6.0, Matlab and Microsoft Access etc. The experimental control of superplastic micro-extrusion system and demonstration of temperature, displacement, stress and speed in teaching experiment can be realized by use of this system. And the software package has a convenient man-machine operating interface and high interactive feature.The present work has established a foundation for the experimental teaching of superplastic micro-extrusion as well as for the further research on this technology.