Warm Bulge Forming of Small Diameter A1100 Aluminium Tube

In recent years, the small diameter aluminium tube has been widely utilized for chemical instruments and medical devices. These instruments are should be minimized since the usage of the small diameter tubes has been extremely increased. However, the deformation characteristics could not be scaled down similarly to the material dimensions due to the size effect. Thus, tube bulge forming is necessary to clarified the deformation characteristics of the small diameter tubes. In this paper, the formability of the warm tube bulge forming by using the small diameter A1100 aluminium tube with 2.0 mm outer diameter and 0.2 mm thickness has been investigated. As the results, the effect of the different temperature and the different internal pressure on the tube bulge forming of the small diameter A1100 aluminium tubes was clarified. Furthermore, it was confirmed that the variation of the internal pressure loading rate affected the deformation characteristics of the tubes.