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Characterization and formability of aluminum IS 737 40800 grade material at

elevated temperature

Conference Paper · December 2010

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.5043.1365

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Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering & Technology Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School
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2nd International Conference on Production and Industrial Engineering CPIE-
1
2010
Characterization and formability of aluminum IS 737 40800 grade material
at elevated temperature

Swadesh Kumar Singh1*, M L Kranti Raj1, SM Hussaini2 and Amit Kumar Gupta2
1
Deptt. of Mechanical Engineering, GRIET, Bachupally, Hyderabad, AP, India – 500090
2
Deptt. of Mechanical Engineering, BITS Hyderabad Campus, India
*Corresponding author: Email ID: swadesh@iitdalumni.com
Tel. +9140-23042555, Fax. +09140-23040860

used in FEM analysis for square cup drawing. Toros et al

Abstract: IS 737 grade Aluminum alloy is extensively
used in industries especially automobile due to its low weight.
But this material is poorly formable and weldable. That is the
reason this material is not used in certain application
although it is having superior characteristic of making light
weight assemblies. In the present investigation the material is
drawn at elevated temperature and its formability was
investigated in warm condition and it was found that there
was substantial increase in the formability of IS 737 40800
grade material when drawn at 3500C. The sensitivity index
value is calculated by jump test. These tests were conducted
in the plastic region where stress – strain curves are uniform.
It is observed that by increasing the temperature of specimen
there is an increase in the value of ‘m’ because of increase in
plasticity of material. Thickness strains were also calculated
and it was found that by increasing the temperature of the
material up to 3500C, these strains were more uniform.
Key words: Aluminum alloy; warm forming; sensitivity
index; formability.
1. INTRODUCTION
Aluminum although very ductile but it is having
very poor formability which restricts its use in most of the
industrial applications which requires forming e.g.
automobile engineering. In recent years there is a effort to
increase the material formability by increasing the
temperature of material before and during forming. Bolt et
al. [1] applied coupled FEM for simulating the warm sheet
forming process of Aluminum alloys using the commercial
code MARC. They concluded that, compared to
experiments, numerical simulation results underestimated
the punch load versus stroke. In their study, DEFORM 2D
and 3D, coupled thermo-elastic-visco-plastic commercial
FEM codes have been used to analyze warm forming of
Magnesium alloys. They reported that the predicted
drawability of cylindrical cups was in good agreement with
the corresponding results. Lee et al., [2] investigated the
warm formability of a commercial Mg-Al-Zn alloy. The
relationship between strain rate and formability was used
to predict the failure occurred on square cup deep drawing.
The measured flow stresses from 2000 C to 4000 C were
[3] investigated on Aluminum–magnesium (Al–Mg) alloys
(5000 series). They observed that formability and the
surface quality of the final product of these alloys are not
good if processing is performed at room temperature, after
the tests in warm conditions the formability of these alloys
is increased at temperature range from 200 to 300 °C and
better surface quality of the final product has been
achieved.
Li et al, [4] investigated that as the forming
temperature increases under the given tooling geometry,
the values of strength coefficient (K) and hardening
exponent (n) of aluminum alloys generally decrease and
behavior of three aluminum sheet alloys, Al 5182+1% Mn,
Al 5754 and Al 6111-T4, are studied in the warm forming
temperature range of 200–350 °C and in the strain rate
range of 0.015–1.5 s−1 . The total elongation in uniaxial
tension is found to increase with increasing temperature
and to decrease with increasing strain rate. Li et al, [5]
investigated that the formability for all the three
Aluminum alloys (Al 5754, Al 5182+1%Mn and Al 6111-
T4) improves at elevated temperatures, the strain hardened
alloys Al 5754 and Al 5182+Mn show considerably
greater improvement than the precipitation hardened alloy
Al 6111-T4. Lee is confirmed by post-forming tensile test
results that rapid warm forming in the above-mentioned
temperature range does not create a significant loss in
yield strength. Temperature effect on drawing of the sheet
was found to have a large effect on formability. Setting die
temperature slightly higher than punch temperature was
favorable in promoting formability. Patrick et al., [6]
investigated that the under warm forming process is
intended to alleviate complex shapes by using an elevated
forming temperature which is below the recrystalization .
Recently author [7-8] investigated the formability of extra
deep drawing (EDD) steel at elevated temperature and it
was found that there was drastic increase in the formability
of material when the temperature of the material increases.
Since aluminum IS 737 40800 grade material is very
important due to its commercial use, so in the present
2nd International Conference on Production and Industrial Engineering CPIE-
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investigation, its formability is investigated which was not

studies by any other author.

2. EXPERIMENTATION:
As discussed in the previous sections that
Aluminum IS 737, 40800 grade material is very important
for automobile industries. This material is having very
poor formability i.e. at room temperature only 59 mm
blank could be successfully drawn into cup (LDR = 1.97).
Circular blanks were made on a wire cut EDM machine of
different diameters and were drawn on the setup shown in Fig.2: Drawn cups of Al IS 737 alloy at room temperature
Fig 1. Cups were drawn at 2000C and 3500C and punch
load and displacement data was recorded. Fig 2 shows the
cups drawn at room temperature. Fig. 3 shows the different
diameter cups drawn at 200°C and Fig. 4 shown the
variable diameter cups drawn at 350°C. It was observed
from load displacement graphs that as the temperature of
the blank during deformation increases, there is a decrease
in the load requirement. This is due to decrease in flow
stresses of material at elevated temperatures. As it was
investigated by Singh et.al [7] that increase in the
temperature of material not only decreases the flow stress Fig.3: Drawn cups of Al IS 737 alloy at 2000C
of material at which the material can be deformed but also
there is increase in the ductility of material and there will
be range in which the material can be drawn safely. It was
also observed from the load displacement curves that at a
particular temperature there is sharp decline in the load
values. This represents fracture. So as represented in Fig. 5
that fracture appears at 75 mm diameter blank so LDR at
350°C is 2.46, which is very high for this material. There
are many automobile components which are produced by
this method and hot/warm forming will decrease the
number of redrawing stages in the manufacturing of these
components.
Fig.4: Drawn cups of Al IS 737 alloy at 3500C
Punch load Vs Displacement of Al at 350 C

4000

3500
73 mm
3000 75 mm
Punch Load (N)

2500

2000

1500

1000

500

0
0 10 20 30 40
Displacement (mm)

Fig.5 Punch Load Vs Displacement diagram of Al at 3500C

Fig.1: Complete experimental test rig
2nd International Conference on Production and Industrial Engineering CPIE-
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3. DISCUSSION presented in Table. These tests were conducted in the

plastic region where stress – strain curves are uniform. It is
A. Stress Vs Strain graphs
observed that by increasing the temperature of specimen
Fig 6 presents the stress-strain diagram of Al at there is an increase in the value of „m‟ because of increase
room temperature, 200°C and 350°C. It can be observed in plasticity of material.
that as the temperature increases, Ys and UTS of the
material decreases and when the temperature reaches Temperature Room 2000C 3500C
350°C, percentage elongation suddenly increases. Beyond Sensitivity index 0.0075 0.0165 0.0414
this temperature Al deforms like superplastic flow.
Following is the composition of Al alloy under
investigation.

Si-0.79 Cu-0.008 Mg-0.21 Ni-0.25 Ti-0.056

Fe-0.74 Mn-0.15 Zn-0.087 Cr-0.013 Al-rest

Fig. 7 Jump test of Al at 3500C

Fig. 6 Stress-strain diagram of Al at room temperature,
2000C and 3500C
b. Jump test
Strain rate sensitivity index is associated with
change in thermal assistance to dislocation motion.
Normally by increasing the temperature of material,
dislocation forest intensity will decrease. This will increase
the value of „m‟. In the present investigation sensitivity
index value is calculated by jump test. In this test the
crosshead speed was increased from 1 mm/min to 10
mm/min and the jump test at 3500C are shown in Fig.7.
The value of „m‟ is then calculated by:
c. thickness plots
As expected it can be observed from these figures
that as the draw ratio increases there is increase in the
extent of necking at the punch corner of the drawn cup, it
can also be seen that as the temperature increases there are
more uniform thickness in the drawn cup due to lower
mean flow stresses and also an indicated in Fig 8 that for
the same draw ratio of 59mm, extent of necking decreases
at higher temperatures. It is because lesser loads are
required to deform the material due to decreased mean
flow stress and at 3500C thickness of the cup is very
uniform for the same reason.

Where P1 and P2 are loads before and after jump and V1

and V2 are crosshead speed before and after the jump.
Three tests were conducted and the average value of the
sensitivity index is calculated. The variation in the
sensitivity index (m) with respect to temperature is Fig. 8 Thickness variation at variable temperature
 2nd International Conference on Production and Industrial Engineering CPIE-
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4. CONCLUSIONS:
Formability of commercially pure Aluminum was
investigated at room temperature, 2000C and at 3500C. It
was found that by increasing the temperature due to
decrease in the mean flow stresses formability increases. It
was also found that there is uniform thickness variation for
the same draw ratio at elevated temperature. Extent of
necking decreases due to decrease in the punch load during
forming.

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author would like to acknowledge the financial
support given by All India counsel of Technical Education
(AICTE) Govt. of India under Career Award to carry out
the research activities in the institute.

REFRENCES:

[1] Bolt, P.J., Lamboo, N.A.P.M., Rozier, P.J.C.M., (2001) “Feasibility

of warm drawing of Al products”, Journal of Material Processing
Technology, vol. 115, pp118-121.
[2] Lee, Y.S., Kim, M.C., Kim, S.W., Kwon, Y.N., Choi, S.W., Lee,
J.H., (2007) “Experimental and analysis for forming limit of AZ31
alloy on warm sheet metal forming”, Journal of Material Processing
Technology, Vol. 187-188, pp103-107
[3] Serkan Toros, Fahrettin Ozturk and Ilyas Kacar (2008)“Review of
warm forming of Al-Mg alloys”, Journal of Material Processing
Technology Vol.207,Issue 1-3, pp1-12
[4] Li Daoming, Amit Ghosh, (2003) “Tensile deformation behavior of
aluminum alloys at warm forming temperatures”, Materials Science
and Engineering A, Vol. 352, Issues 1-2, pp 279-286.
[5] Li Daoming, Amit Ghosh, (2004) “Biaxial warm forming behaviour
of aluminium sheet alloy”, Materials Processing Technology, Vol.
145, Issues 3, pp 281-293
[6] Patrick A. Tebbe, Ghassan T. Kridli (2004) “Warm forming of
aluminium alloys: an overview and future directions”, Department
of Engineering, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA
International Journal of Materials and Product Technology - Vol.
21, No.1/2/3 pp. 24 - 40
[7] Swadesh Kumar Singh, M. Swathi, Apurv Kumar and K. Mahesh
(2010), “Understanding formability of EDD steel at elevated
temperatures using finite element simulation” Published online
Materials and Design.
[8] Swadesh Kumar Singh, Amit Kumar Gupta and K. Mahesh (2010),
“Prediction of mechanical properties of extra deep drawn steel in
blue brittle region using Artificial Neural Network” Materials and
Design, Vol. 31, pp 2288-2295.

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