 | 2007 |
Abstract:
The industrial development in lightweight constructions manufacturing implies innovative production processes. Therefore, a composite extrusion process has been developed by the Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 10 “Integration of forming, cutting, and joining for the flexible production of lightweight space frame structures”, funded by the German Research Foundation. In this process endless wires of high strength steel are embedded in a base material such as aluminum to enhance the physical profile properties. In recent years the Finite Element Method was used to simulate extrusion processes in addition to experimental investigations to gain an insight into the stresses and velocities in the die and the welding chamber. The need to extrude complex profile sections without any torsion or deflection leads to a virtual process optimization to realize an optimized material flow. Presently published works present different parametric optimizations of the die geometry, but most often these procedures are not directly applicable in industry. This work shows the importance of the development of simulation-based optimization procedures in composite extrusion processes; it presents to what extent HyperWorks Software can be used for industrial application in extrusion process optimization. Especially a numerical optimization of the die is presented to realize a homogenous exit speed in composite extrusion of thin-walled cross sections. The numerical problems are calculated by the coupled thermo-mechanical finite element code HyperXtrude. To achieve an optimization the code is introduced in the optimization software HyperStudy.