Aluminum Alloys Behavior during Forming

Abstract

Industrial revolution toward weight reduction and fuel efficiency of the automotive and aerospace vehicles is the major concern to replace heavy metals with light weight metals without affecting much strength. For this, aluminum alloys are the major contributors to those industries. Moreover, aluminum alloys are majorly categorized as 1xxx, 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx, 7xxx, and 8xxx based on major alloying elements. Among all, 2xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx are having majority of applications in the abovementioned industries. For manufacturing any engineering deformable components, forming characteristics are must. Forming behavior of aluminum alloys has been evaluated through different processes including deep drawing, stretching, incremental forming, bending, hydro forming etc., under different process conditions (cold, warm, and hot conditions) and process parameters. Each process has its own process feasibility to evaluate the formability without any forming defects in products. The present chapter discusses a few important processes and their parameter effect on the aluminum alloys through the experimenta-tions and simulation works.