NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF INTRICATE ALUMINIUM TUBE AL6061T4 THICKNESS VARIATION AT DIFFERENT FRICTION COEFFICIENT AND INTERNAL PRESSURES DURING BENDING

The Present paper represents the delicate bending process of a 11mm diameter uniform aluminium tube using a series of high internal pressure used inside the die cavity. variable coefficient of friction between the die cavity and tube samples also taken into consideration. The less diameter tube bending is performed inside the die cavity. The tube is pressed inside the die cavity with varying high internal pressure. Since normal bending is not possible for aluminium tubes having a diameter less than 10mm. Also, tube diameter is not uniform and keeps reducing continuously. The large inner diameter of tube is 11 mm at one end and 1mm at another end. The thickness of the tube is 2.5mm. Bending of the tube depends on various parameters such as material property, stresses in the bend, tube wall thickness variation, tube shrinking, neutral axis deviation, internal pressure produced inside die cavity to pressed the materials, coefficient of frction, die rigidity etc. Initially, the simulation is carried out on DEFORM 3D software but due to the limitation of the software solver to take almost a month to get the results and is also not desirable, the ABAQUS software is used later. Results output getting from this software is quite satisfactory. The Thickness variation graphs are plotted against 5 different internal pressures of 0.5MPa, 1MPa, 3MPa, 5MPa and 10MPa. The Thickness variation graph was also plotted against three different friction coefficients of 0.01, 0.001 and 0.005.