Evaluation of Flow Stresses of Tubular Materials Considering Anisotropic Effects by Hydraulic Bulge Tests

This paper aims to evaluate the stress-strain characteristics of tubular materials considering their anisotropic effects by hydraulic bulge tests and a proposed analytical model. In this analytical model, Hill’s orthogonal anisotropic theory was adopted for deriving the effective stresses and effective strains under a biaxial stress state. Annealed AA6011 aluminum tubes and SUS409 stainless-steel tubes were used for the bulge test. The tube thickness at the pole, bulge height, and the internal forming pressure were measured simultaneously during the bulge test. The effective stress-effective strain relations could be determined by those measured values and this proposed analytical model. The flow stress curves of the tubular materials obtained by this approach were compared with those obtained by the tensile test with consideration of the anisotropic effect. The finite element method was also adopted to conduct the simulations of hydraulic bulge forming with the flow stress curves obtained by the bulge tests and tensile tests. The analytical forming pressures versus bulge heights were compared with the experimental results to validate the approach proposed in this paper.