Experimental analysis and smoothed particle hydrodynamics modeling of electrohydraulic forming of sheet metal parts

One of the considerable advantages of high velocity forming methods i.e. Electrohydraulic Forming method is improvement in the formability of the materials in comparison to conventional methods. In this study, the electrohydraulic forming method is used to free-form circular plates and to study the effect of some process parameters such as discharge energy, stand-off distance and electrode gap size on the deformed part. In addition, the process was simulated using Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) methods and the results were compared with the experimental data. It was shown that the numerical approach overestimated the experimental results. This was happened due to the dissipated energy of electrical circuit in the experimental test. Higher discharge energies caused larger dome heights and enhancing the stand-off distance declined the dome height. On the other hand, the electrode gap size had an optimum value which provided the maximum dome height. It was found that, the implemented method of applying discharge energy for simulation reduces the differences between the experimental and numerical results lower than 10%. It was noticed that the utilizing the SPH method in the simulation of the EHF process is a very promising method and could be beneficial in the research work and industrial application.