Investigation of semi-solid aluminum alloy filling-plastic flowing in thixoforging

The semi-solid filling-plastic flowing integrated forging process of semi-solid 6061 Al alloy was simulated by commercial ?nite element software DEFORM-3D. Temperature, fluid and stress-strain fields were considered in numerical simulation. The simulation results show that the plastic deformation of billet of the ends is higher than that of billet in the straight cylinder. The value of plastic deformation varies with loading mode and plastic deformation fields at the stage of increasing pressure to constant value. When the thixoforging experiments were performed at 590 ?, 15 mm/s of punch velocity and 46 MPa of pressure side urn, it gets the filling wholly and dense internal organization of semi-solid thixoforging parts is gotten. Finite element analysis results are compatible with experimental ones.