Investigation into hydromechanical reverse redrawing assisted by separate radial pressure - Process development and theoretical verification

High-quality cups with a deep drawing ratio of more than four cannot be simply drawn by conventional drawing and redrawing. A special technology is required to form cups of a high deep drawing ratio. In the present study, after the conventional mechanical deep drawing process, subsequent hydromechanical reverse redrawing with controlled radial pressure has been developed. In order to increase the deep drawing ratio by more than four, the radial pressure is controlled independently of the chamber pressure and thus an optimum forming condition can be determined by varying the radial pressure. The process has been verified by a rigid-plastic finite element (FE) analysis considering all the external force boundary conditions induced by the hydrostatic pressure. The pressure distribution on the sheet is calculated numerically from the simplified Navier-Stokes equation. Through the experiment and the FE analysis, it has been shown that hydromechanical reverse redrawing assisted by separate radial pressure, developed in the present study, helps to increase the drawability of cylindrical cups, and thus it is useful when forming long cups.