Tube hydroforming (THF) is one of metal forming technologies which has been widely used to manufacture complex hollow workpeices. In THF, a variety of failures may occur and one of them is wrinkling. But recent researches show that wrinkling may be used as a preforming process to improve the formability of tubes. In this paper, a new geometry-based wrinkling indicator is proposed to evaluate the wrinkling level in THF and the wrinkle evolution diagram (WED) based on the shape change of the wrinkles is presented to display the four-stage evolution of the useful wrinkles. The wrinkling levels in THF with axial feeding under various loading paths are predicted respectively via finite element simulation, the influence of loading paths on the wrinkling behavior is investigated, and the evolving stages of the useful wrinkles is revealed via the proposed WED. The results indicate that the proposed wrinkle indicator can distinctly evaluate the wrinkling level, the wrinkling level under pulsating loading path is higher than that under polygonal linear one and four-stage evolution of the useful wrinkles could be evidently demonstrated via the WED.
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