Experimental and numerical investigation of processes that occur during high velocity hydroforming technologies: An example of tubular blank free bulging during hydrodynamic forming

Frequent use of hydroforming in automotive and aerospace industries requires intensive research of all aspects of this relatively new technology. In this paper we have studied the characteristics of aluminum tubular blank free bulging during hydrodynamic forming; both experimentally, and through numerical finite element analysis using LS-DYNA. We obtained the quantitative description of a pressure wave in working liquid, which directly relates to the load on the blank. The finite element analysis examined how a computationally efficient simulation model could be achieved, to replicate the experimental testing results. It was intended to correlate the simulation with experimental results; we were successful in demonstrating that the simulation can achieve an acceptable level of correlation with the experimental results.