A numerical study of swage autofrettage of thick-walled tubes

Swage autofrettage process is used for internal forming and sizing of thick-walled tubes designed to withstand high internal pressures. In this process, a mandrel with a diameter slightly larger than that of the tube is pressed inside the tube and in so doing, creates the internal profile. This paper presents an experimental and numerical study of this process. Two dimensional axi-symmetric and three dimensional finite element analyses are used to investigate the effects of workpiece and mandrel geometry on the forming load and part quality. Experiments are carried out to validate the numerical results.