New lightweight construction prospects enabled by hydroforming

To reduce weight of a component and improve its performance, the part properties have to be adapted to the requirements, the load profile, and the function of the product. This leads to a continuously increasing complexity of the components necessitating innovative manufacturing strategies for producing the desired shapes from materials that are difficult to handle. Hydroforming offers high potential for fulfilling this demand, especially, if it is applied in deliberate process integrations, combinations, and chains that allow exploiting complementary advantages of all technologies involved. The paper presents four examples of such manufacturing strategies: magnetic pulse welding followed by tube hydroforming, deep drawing combined with injection moulding and hydroforming using the molten plastic, free bending or roll forming followed by hydroforming, and deep drawing with integrated media forming.