Effect of frictional boundary conditions and percentage area reduction on the extrusion pressure of aluminum AA6063 alloy using FE analysis modelling

Abstract: Finite Element Analysis was carried out to describe the effect of frictional boundary conditions and percentage reduction on deformation modelling (forward extrusion) of Aluminum AA6063 alloy. Curved die profiles of regular polygons (square, hexagonal, heptagonal, and octagonal) were designed using MATLAB R2009b and Autodesk Inventor 2013 to generate the coordinate and the solid CAD model of the die profile respectively form a circular billet. The numerical analysis was performed using DeformTM-3D commercial package with frictional boundary conditions of 0.38 and 0.75 representing the wet and dry condition and varying the percentage reduction of 50%, 70%, and 90%. The results of the temperature distribution, effective stress, effective strain, and strain rate were reported. As the percentage area reduction increases, the extrusion pressure also increases with an increasing frictional condition, and die length. Also, extrusion pressure decreases when the side of the polygon increases from square-shaped section follow by hexagonal shaped-section and least in octagonal shaped-section for both friction factors and percentage area reductions. For a given percentage reduction and cross-sectional area, there is no distinct difference between the predictive loads for the shaped-polygons. When the result of this analysis is compared with the experimental results from the literature, it is evident that DeformTM-3D is an effective tool for finite element analysis of non-isothermal deformation processes