Research On VPF Process Of Aluminum Alloy Car Door Parts

Viscous pressure forming (VPF) is a new sheet flexible forming process developed in 1990s, which is suitable for the forming of high strength, low plasticity and difficulty deformation materials and has wide application in automotive manufacturing and aeronautic industry.As the automobile industry's growing, more and more aluminum alloys have used in the manufacturing of automobile and aluminum alloys replaced parts of steel planks used in automobile parts which is one of the key resources for light weighting of automobiles. But as aluminum alloys have some limitation in forming such as crinkle, fracture and difficult for welding, the industrial scale of aluminum alloys is limited. In this paper, VPF used for forming automobile door outer with aluminum alloys is investigated, and the investigation used with numerical simulation and experimentation.Using commercial finite element software Ansys, the numerical simulations of the forming processes of decorated rib and handle, which are key positions in the door outer are conducted and investigated the differences of VPF and tradition forming. By using numerical simulation that investigates the effects of viscous injection flow rate on plank's VPF formability and based on those investigated four-aluminum alloy's VPF.The die has been designed for the door outer's viscous pressure forming. The experimentation of the door outer's viscous pressure forming under different blank holder pressures has been done. The strain distributions of the decorated rib and handle are obtained by the girding method and the thickness strain distributions are also obtained. The forming processes of the decorated rib and handle with the numerical simulation and experimentation has been done for cooperation. The numerical simulation results can indicate aluminum alloy's viscous pressure forming for car door bodies.