Abstract
Recently tube hydroforming has been widely applied to the automotive industries due to its several advantages over conventional methods. In this paper, attention is paid to comparison of an implicit and an explicit finite element method widely used for numerical simulation of a hydroforming process. For an explicit FEM, a huge amount of computational time is required because of the very small time increment to solve a quasi-static problem. Hence, when an explicit FEM is used fDr a hydroforming process, it is general to convert the real problem to a virtual problem with a different processing time and mass density by appropriate scaling factor. However it is difficult to figure out how large the scaling should be adopted enough to ignore the dynamic effects and maintain the desired accuracy. In this paper, the comparison of the results obtained from both methods focus on the accuracy of the predicted geometrical shape and the stress with various scaling factors which are applied to analyze hydroforming process of an automobile lower arm.
