Creep Age Forming of Fiber Metal Laminates: Effects of Process Time and Temperature and Stacking Sequence of Core Material

Fiber metal laminates (FMLs) are a type of hybrid materials interlacing composites and metals. In the present work, FMLs with aluminum alloy 6061 as the skin and E-glass fiber-reinforced polypropylene (PP) as the core material are fabricated and formed by the creep age forming (CAF) process. The effects of time and temperature as the process parameters and thickness and stacking sequences of composites layers as the FML parameters are evaluated on the springback of glass-reinforced aluminum laminates (GLARE) FMLs. After the CAF process, the springback of creep age-formed FMLs is calculated. The results show that the FMLs can be successfully formed with the CAF process by considering appropriate time and temperature. In addition, the stacking sequence of composite layers can affect the springback behavior of FMLs significantly.

Numerical and Experimental Investigations on the Effects of Variable Cavity Pressure on the Formability of GLARE Using Hydromechanical Deep Drawing

Excellent physical and mechanical properties of fiber metal laminates (FMLs) have made them a very popular and most suitable material to make high strength and lightweight products in different industries for example automobile, military, and aerospace. Glass fiber aluminum reinforced epoxy (GLARE) is one of the most used fiber metal laminate among the family of fiber metal laminates, but there are some challenges in its formability. Our study mainly focuses on the formability of the GLARE cup parts by using hydromechanical deep drawing. Forming depth with good quality (without any wrinkling, delamination, or fracture), failure mode analysis and wall thinning rate (%) distribution of the parts are the main criteria in the formability. The influence of variable cavity pressure (VCP) with respect to punch strokes had been investigated by using numerical simulations and experiments. Results showed that the variable cavity pressure in case of increasing or decreasing the cavity pressure had very much effect on the formability. Stepwise increasing the VCP with respect to punch strokes resulted in a maximum forming depth of 29.00mm as well as good quality whereas in the case of stepwise decreasing the variable cavity pressure, results were not encouraging. Commercially available code ABAQUS explicit was used for finite element analysis simulation which had shown close agreement with the experimental results.