A Study on Optimal Design of Process Parameters in Tube Drawing Process of Rectangular Parts by Combining Box-Behnken Design of Experiment, Response Surface Methodology and Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

摘要

Tube drawing process is comprised of many factors that have great impact on the formed part quality and die life. In producing polygonal sections from round tube, due to accumulation of residual stress in corners, the final shape of the drawn part is to some extent different from what is expected. Therefore, selection of optimal combination of drawing parameters for enhancing the parts quality and die life is crucial. In the present paper, a complete multi criteria optimization procedure starting from numerical modeling, and leading to the search of robust optimal process parameters is proposed. A numerical model of tube drawing process of aluminum alloy for rectangular section is developed by means of ABAQUS and validated experimentally. Then a total set of 27 numerical tests are conducted based on four-factors and three levels Box-Behnken design to correlate empirical relationship between factors (i.e., die angle, bearing length, friction coefficient and drawing velocity) and responses (i.e., drawing force, linear and peripheral thickness distributions and dimensional error). Response surface model of each quality characteristic is obtained and analysis of variances is performed to check the adequacy of developed models. Finally the obtained RSM models are integrated with their weight factors and the objective function is formed. This function is then associated with artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to find factor combination regarding minimum drawing force and dimensional error, as well as maximum thickness distributions. Results indicate that the optimal result obtained through RSM-ABC is in agreement with those derived from simulations and confirmatory experiments.