Hydroforming of High-Strength Aluminum Tubes with Thermo-Mechanical Manufacturing Processes

The amount of complex profile components in car bodies increases due to the emerg ing electromobility. High-strength aluminum alloys are ideally suited as material for automotive applications due to their extraordinary lightweight construction potential. The presented study focuses on the transfer of established thermo-mechanical manufacturing processes for sheet metal components to hydroforming of tube material. Demonstrator components are produced from EN
AW-7020 using W-temper-forming and hot forming and compared numerically and experimentally. The results show that the determined material properties are sufficiently accurate to numerically represent the temperature-supported processes with excellent precision. The formed components can be used to demonstrate the potential of hydroforming for high-strength aluminum tubes using W-temper-forming and hot forming.