The flowforming is a continuous cold forging technique to produce thin-walled cylindrical parts with high strength and increased surface roughness. The flowforming technique is used to obtain seamless, conical and both inner and outer surfaces counters by forming the suitable preform. This technique provides continuous cold forging effect in order to reduce the wall thickness of the cylindrical shape preform, stretching and extruding the part with forming rollers and the material flows along a mandrel.
The flowforming technology plays a significant role in a number of sectors including, automotive oil and gas, medical particularly in aerospace and defense industries. Many different types of materials such as aluminum, highly temperature-resistant steels, stainless steel, titanium or Inconel can be used in flowforming technology. This technology has been used in the aerospace sectors in order to produce drive shafts, control & piston rods, hydraulic cylinders and hollow tubular parts.
There are two known conventional methods which are called as forward and backward flowforming. It is difficult to produce the parts that are longer than 4 meters by using these conventional methods and also have more than one contour on the inner surface. Thus, an innovative technical solution of the problem was developed by Repkon Inc., and the new method of the flow forming is called as ‘‘Core Mandrel Flowforming’’.
The aim of this study is to present technical details of the core mandrel method and metallurgical examinations of the flowforming technique.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Flowforming, Cold Forging, Core-Mandrel, Aerospace, Cold Working
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