Design Optimization of Angular Extrusion for Severe Plastic Deformation of Tubular Specimens

The purpose of this work is to optimize angular extrusion for sever plastic deformation of tubular specimens. A finite element model (FEM) was built in Deform-3D^® for three extrusion dies and analyzed. The dies were ECAP (135°), TCAP with external groove of 90° (denoted as TCAP-e) and TCAP with internal groove of 90° (denoted as TCAP-i). The analysis for process parameters (such as coefficient of friction-μ, die angles-ѱ and φ, temperature - T, and radius ratio-R) showed that TCAP-i was the optimal die in processing Al6063 tubes based on strain and load distribution of the model. The TCAP-i die model was further optimized for different parameters namely die angles, coefficient of friction, deformation ratio and temperature. The results showed that at constant process temperature of 25 °C, the optimal TCAP-i has the following parameters: φ₂=80⁰, Ѱ₁=30⁰, Ѱ₂=80⁰, Ѱ₃=30⁰, μ =0.4 and R =1.5.