Increasing the working limit of extruded aluminum tubes during draw bending by introducing a wiper die

Aluminum alloy sections are widely utilized in many applications such as in general structures and automotive components. Owing to the increasing complexity of these components there is an increasing demand for highly curved thin wall sections. Therefore, reliable bending processes are required to manufacture such components without undesirable deformations such as wrinkling and folding occurring during bending. To prevent undesirable deformations and predict when they might occur, it is necessary to generate much data from various forming configurations in which process parameters are varied. In this paper, the authors concentrate on the problem of bending square-section thinwalled tubes and use finite element analysis to generate the data required to predict working limits. Two different tube materials (A6063S-O and A6063S-T5) were used to investigate the relationship between deformation behavior and material properties. Moreover, the effect of using a wiper die on the working limit of the extruded aluminum sections was investigated.