A new method for production of variable thickness aluminium tubes: Numerical and experimental studies

Tube drawing is one of the mostly used techniques for producing tubes in various sizes. In this method, tube passes through the die and mandrel to produce constant wall thickness tube. In some applications like transportation industry, design necessities cause requirement for these kinds of tubes. Furthermore some manufacturing processes like tube hydroforming dictate have a tube with variable thickness. In this study, with a modification made to the classical tube drawing process, the sinking and fixed-mandrel tube drawing methods were mixed together to produce tubes with variable thickness in the axial direction. An optimization method, namely the leapfrog optimizer for constrained minimization, was coupled with a finite element model to study design specifications i.e. effect of initial tube geometry on this new process. The obtained results from finite element method (tube drawing force, the minimum and maximum final thickness of tube) were compared with the experiments performed in the designed and manufactured machine and acceptable agreement was observed. Based on these results, the maximum and minimum thicknesses in the final produced tube are mostly dependent on the thickness and outer diameter of initial tube respectively.