Hot Air Forming Analysis of Automotive Rear Sub Frame using Aluminum Tube

알루미늄 튜브를 이용한 자동차 리어 서브 프레임의 열간가스 성형해석

Recently, the hydroforming of high strength aluminum tubes has many studies and applications in manufacturing industry, especially in automotive industry. But high strength aluminum tube has limited expansion capability at most 15% at normal temperature. New manufacturing process, called hot air forming, is introduced to apply aluminum tube to the automotive sub frame components which have complex shape and require high expansion ratio about 40%. The process is carried out at the elevated temperature above $500^{\circ}C$, so numerous material properties and process parameters related to high temperature should be investigated and determined to get a sound product. In this paper, the hot air forming process of automotive sub frame was investigated. The effect of the forming parameters such as the temperature of tool, axial feeding and gas pressure are analyzes by using explicit finite element method.