Optimization on the Production of Variable Thickness Aluminium Tubes

The variable thickness tube drawing is a new modification in the tube drawing methods which enables production of axially variable thickness tubes faster and easier in comparison with other similar methods like radial forging or indentation forging. The production of this type of tubes can be used in optimum design of mechanical parts which do not necessarily need constant thickness along the axis of tube and this method can strikingly reduce the overall weight of parts and mechanical assemblies like cars. In this paper, the variable thickness tube drawing were parameterized in a MATLAB code and optimized with the Ls-Opt software as an optimization engine and Ls-Dyna as a FE solver. The final objective of this optimization study is to determine the minimum thickness which can be produced in one step by this method with various tube dimensions (tube thickness and outer diameter). For verification of results, some experiments were performed in the tube drawing machine which was fabricated by this research group and acceptable correspondence was observed between numerical and experimental results.