Characterization of mechanical properties for tubular materials based on hydraulic bulge test under axial feeding force

A T-shape tube hydraulic bulge test under axial feeding force is carried out to characterize the mechanical properties of EN AW 5049-O and 6060-O aluminium alloys.The punch displacement,T-branch height and axial compressive force are recorded online during the experiment.An intelligent inverse identification framework combining the finite element method and numerical optimization algorithm is developed to determine material parameters by fitting simulated results to the experimental data iteratively.The identified constitutive parameters using the inverse modelling technique are compared with those determined by the theoretical analysis and uniaxial tensile test.The comparison shows that the predicted bulge height and punch force based on the material parameters obtained by the three methods are different and the inverse strategy produces the smallest gap between numerical and experimental values.It is possible to conclude that the hydraulic bulge test can be applied to characterize the stress-strain curve of tubular materials at the large strain scope,and the automatic inverse framework is a more accurate post-processing procedure to identify material constitutive parameters compared with the classical analytical model.

An inverse strategy to determine constitutive parameters of tubular materials for hydroforming processes

This paper is to determine the flow stress curve of 5049-O aluminium alloy by a tube hydraulic bulging test with fixed end-conditions. During this test, several tubular specimens are bulged under different internal pressures before their bursting, and the corresponding bulging height and wall thickness at the pole are measured. An inverse strategy is developed to determine the constitutive parameters of tubular materials based on experimental data, which combines the finite element method with gradient-based optimization techniques. In this scheme, the objective function is formulated with the sum of least squares of the error between numerical and experimental data, and finite difference approximation is used to calculate the gradient. The tubular material behavior is assumed to meet the von Mises yield criterion and Hollomon exponential hardening law. Then, constitutive parameters identification is performed by minimization of the objective function. In order to validate the performance of this framework, identified parameters are compared with those obtained by two types of theoretical models, and tensile tests are performed on specimens cut from the same tubes. The comparison shows that this inverse framework is robust and can achieve a more accurate parameter identification by eliminating mechanical and geometrical assumptions in classical theoretical analysis.

A general synthesis of inorganic nanotubes as high-rate anode materials of sodium ion batteries

Ino rganic tubular materials have an exceptionally wide range of applications,yet developing a simple and universal method to controllably synthesize them remains challenging.In this work,we report a vaporphase-etching hard-template method that can directly fabricate tubes on various thermally stable oxide and sulfide materials.This synthesis method features the introduction of a vapor-phase-etching process to greatly simplify the steps involved in preparing tubular materials and avoids complicated postprocessing procedures.Furthermore,the in-situ heating transmission electron microscopy(TEM)technique is used to observe the dynamic formation process of TiO_(2-x) tubes,indicating that the removal process of the Sb2S3 templates first experienced the Rayleigh instability,then vapor-phase-etching process.When used as an anode for sodium ion batteries,the TiO_(2-x) tube exhibits excellent rate performance of134.6 mA h g^(-1) at the high current density of 10 A g^(-1) and long-term cycling over 7000 cycles.Moreover,the full cell demonstrates excellent cycling performance with capacity retention of 98%after 1000 cycles,indicating that it is a promising anode material for batteries.This method can be expanded to the design and synthesis of other thermally-stable tubular materials such as ZnS,MoS_(2),and SiO_(2).