FEM Analysis of the Isothermal Forging of a Connecting Rod from Material Previously Deformed by ECAE

This present work deals with the design of a set of dies employed to manufacture a connecting rod by forging a billet of nanostructured aluminum alloy. Nanostructured parts exhibit excellent mechanical properties compared to the non- nanostructured alloys. Moreover, the forgeability of nanostructured materials is higher and hence, fewer strokes are necessary. In this paper, two set of dies are designed to perform a two stroke forging process and to obtain the desired nanostructured part. The first step to manufacture nanostructured parts is to employ a Severe Plastic Deformation Process (SPD) to produce the nanostructured material. So, the SPD material is forged, generally by isothermal forging to produce the part. The flow behavior of a 5083 Aluminum Alloy (5083-AA) after the SPD process has been determined by experimental tests. Finite Element (FE) and Finite Volume (FV) simulations have been run by using nanostructured 5083-AA flow rule, in order to design the dies.