Investigation into the effect of pre-bulging during hydromechanical deep drawing with uniform pressure onto the blank

Many parameters influence the process of sheet hydroforming, but the key one is the pre-bulging. Pre-bulging includes two parameters: pre-bulging height and pre-bulging pressure, which influence the forming process significantly. In this paper, based on the proposed hydromechanical deep drawing with uniform pressure onto the blank, the effect of pre-bulging on the forming is investigated experimentally and the needed process windows for the pre-bulging pressure and the pre-bulging height are built by using pure aluminum and aluminum alloy. Finally, FEM is used to analyze the forming process to explain some results which were found in the experiment. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.