Experiment of Laser Assisted Shear Spinning for Aluminum Alloy Spherical Thin-Walled Parts

Abstract

Thermal energy field is the main way to improve the formability and dimensional precision of components in sheet forming. In order to solve the temperature fluctuation of traditional heat sources, a well-controlled laser heat source was introduced into sheet metal shear spinning to improve the spinnability and forming accuracy by matching local deformation with local heating reasonably. Laser-assisted shear spinning facility was built based on the existing spinning machine, and a model of laser irradiation point drift of ellipsoidal components under the rigid connection of laser heat source was established to analyse the optimal region of laser thermal field loading. The theoretical analysis shows that, during laser-assisted spinning, the rigid connection can be deemed as precise heating under the condition of mandrel with small variation of section circle radius. Subsequently, laser-assisted shear spinning tests on the thin-walled aluminum alloy ellipsoidal components were conducted. The results show that, compared with cold spinning, the laser assisted method extends the spinnability of difficult-to-deformation material in shear spinning and significantly improves the precision and thickness of the spun thin-walled components, which verifies the feasibility of the developed test setup and process design method.

Keywords

• aluminum alloy
• thin-walled component
• laser assisted spinning
• formability
• process design