The Numerical Simulation of Air Bulge Forming of Profiled Can
Air bulge forming is a forming process where an inner pressure deforms the material to the shape of a die cavity. The main concerns about such a process of profiled cans are to avoid wall thickness reduction, wrinkling and bursting. The success of this process strongly depends on the choice of process parameters, i.e. the properties of material, thickness and inner pressure. By transforming the problem into a deformation controlled rather than a force controlled process, the results from the process parameter estimation become more reliable but on the other hand less intuitive. In this context, the influence of materials, friction coefficient, transitional fillet radius, thickness and bulging load are studied and some suited technological parameters and forming rules are obtained. The most important point is that the simulation and results of experiments are probably consistent.