Manufacturing Review (Jan 2015)

Material modelling and its application to creep-age forming of aluminium alloy 7B04

  • Lam Aaron C.L.,
  • Shi Zhusheng,
  • Huang Xia,
  • Yang Yo-Lun,
  • Zeng Yuansong,
  • Lin Jianguo

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1051/mfreview/2015022
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2
p. 19

Abstract

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Creep-ageing behaviour of aluminium alloy 7B04-T651 at 115 °C under a range of tensile stress levels has been experimentally investigated and numerically modelled for creep-age forming (CAF) applications. Creep strain, yield strength evolution and precipitate growth of creep-aged specimens were investigated. The alloy was modelled using a set of unified constitutive equations, which captures its creep deformation and takes into account yield strength contributions from three creep-age hardening mechanisms. Applications of the present work are demonstrated by implementing the determined material model into a commercial finite element analysis solver to analyse CAF operations carried out in a novel flexible CAF tool. Stress relaxation, yield strength, precipitate size and springback were predicted for the creep-age formed plates. The predicted springback were further quantified and compared with experimental measurements and a good agreement of 2.5% deviation was achieved. This material model now enables further investigations of 7B04 under various CAF scenarios to be conducted inexpensively via computational modelling.

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