Automobile Axle Orbital Forming Process And Experimental Research

Half shaft is one of the most important parts of back-axles. When automobiles run, half-shafts subject to the whole weight of the body of vehicles and cargos, and complicated alternate stresses such as transfer torque etc. Now the forming processes of half-shafts by rotary forging techniques can be divided into two steps: preforming by presses and finish forging by rotary-forging machine. But applying this process can raise equipment investment and energy consumption. The technics with the one-heated blanks forged continuously in rotary forging machine may overcome the shortcomings of the traditional techniques. The new technology has not been utilized in the production of half shafts and its theory needs to be further verified and improved.In this paper, the deformation mechanisms of half shafts during one-heat rotary forging processes has been investigated with Principles of Metal Forming and FEM numerical simulation. The forming processes of half shafts by rotary-forging method bas been studied and analyzed by establishing the FEM simulative mechanics model, and then simulated the deformation processes by DEFORM-3D. The distribution of the stress, strain, velocity and temperature during the forming process were simulated through the variation of pivot angle and feed rate per turn. Through the comparison of the pre-forging schemes, the best pivot angle of 3°and the range of the feed rate per turn of from 5mm/r to 7mm/r were determied. In the last, half shafts were produced based on the simulation results in the lab. At the same time, these shaft shafts were compared with the ones which were forged with conventional techniques, the result was microstructure grains were smaller and moer symmetrical, the intensity, hardness and tenacity were reinforced.Through analyzing and studing the results of experiment, the feasibility that The technics with the one-heated blanks forged continuously in rotary forging m achine was confirmed.