CATP-1766 project to demonstrate the Electro-hydraulic forming (EHF) for high strength material

Following the successful completion of ‘CATP 1183 Understanding Lightweighting - The Technical Landscape’ and ‘CATP 1509 Market assessment for Warm hydroforming and HMGF’ project, the AFRC have identified there is a clear requirement from the automotive and aerospace industry to find alternative methods of forming high strength materials at room temperature. In the automotive and aerospace industry use of high strength materials gradually increases to fulfil lightweight demand and CO2 emission norms. Formability of high strength materials is low at room temperature so elevated temperature forming process are applicable for such a material. Due to increased cycle time and heating, hot forming process become expensive as compared with cold forming. Because of these challenges and limitation industries are looking to invest on the alternative manufacturing process such as Magnetic Pulse Forming (MPF) and Electro-Hydraulic Forming (EHF).
The suggested project will cover several topics:
• Review of Electro-Hydraulic Forming process to understand previous work, recent development and identify stakeholders.
• Perform stakeholder engagement to develop case study.
• Design the tools for demonstration part.
• Development of material model from mechanical test data.
• Refinement of tooling geometry and evaluation of preliminary process parameters through Finite Element Analysis (FEA).
The AFRC’s proposed approach to this project is described below in a series of individual work packages.