Fabrication of noncircular multicore microtubes by superplastic dieless drawing process

• Superplastic dieless drawing process is applied to fabrication of non-circular microtube.
• Noncircular microtube were fabricated after a 4-pass superplastic dieless drawing process.
• Cross-sectional shape of noncircular tubes tends to be maintained on the basis of the similarity law.

A superplastic dieless drawing process that requires no dies or tools is applied to the drawing of a Zn–22Al superplastic alloy for noncircular microtubes such as square, rectangular and noncircular multi core tubes having square inner and rectangular outer cross-sections. In this study, the effects of heating condition, such as heating length and the use or nonuse of cooling device, on deformation behavior are investigated. As a result, a square microtube with 0.58 mm side and a rectangular microtube of 0.75 mm × 1.3 mm were fabricated after 3-pass superplastic dieless drawing. In addition, the fundamental deformation behavior of noncircular tubes combined with square and rectangular tubes during the dieless drawing process has been clarified experimentally. The cross-sectional shape of the noncircular tubes after the superplastic dieless drawing process tends to be maintained on the basis of the similarity law in case of a wide heating length compared with a narrow heating length. Furthermore, a noncircular microtube, which has inner square tubes with a 335 μm side, and an outer rectangular tube of 533 μm × 923 μm were fabricated successfully after a 4-pass superplastic dieless drawing process. Consequently, it was found that the superplastic dieless drawing is effective for the fabrication of noncircular multicore microtubes.