A flexible and economical method for electromagnetic flanging of tubes with field shapers.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of electromagnetic flanging of tubes, which uses coils to generate electromagnetic forces to achieve the deformation with high speed but without contact. However, the electromagnetic force decays dramatically with the increase of distance, resulting in strict requirements of geometrical matching between the coils and the tubes. Usually, new coils should be fabricated for tubes with new sizes, which is inconvenient and uneconomical. Therefore, a more flexible and economical method is proposed in this paper, which introduces a solenoid field shaper into the existing electromagnetic flanging system. By adjusting the structure and the position of the field shaper, the distribution of electromagnetic forces can be reshaped to form tubes with various sizes, without changing the coil, whose cost is much higher than a field shaper. The principle of this method is introduced in detail. Then, an electromagnetic-structure coupled finite element simulation model is established to calculate the forming process. The results show that when forming an A6063-T83 aluminum alloy tube with an inner diameter of 110mm, the discharge voltage can be tuned down from 5.3kV, without field shaper, to 4.6kV, with field shaper. That means the energy consumption of the system can be saved by 25%, and the manufacturing process of the field shaper is simpler than that of the forming coil. What's more, when forming tubes with different sizes, the new method shows higher effectiveness, greater flexibility, and lower cost than the traditional way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]