Manufacturing Structural Components Made of Ti-6Al-4V At Room Temperature

Ti-6Al-4V is known as “the work horse” of the Titanium industry, accounting for more than 50% of the total Titanium usage. The alloy is being used in many applications such as aircraft structural parts, high performance automotive parts, marine applications, and recently in architectural applications. Although Ti-6AL-4V can be conventionally cold formed by drawing, stamping and extrusion, the cold formability is somewhat limited and there are significant issues due to springback.

Roll forming allows the manufacture of complex shapes from materials that show limited ductility and allows for the flexible compensation of springback. Roll forming at room temperature is therefore a promising technology for the manufacture of structural components from high strength Titanium sheet.

In this study roll forming and bending trials are performed at room temperature on Ti-6Al-4V sheet and springback, the minimum forming radii as well as the forming strains at failure analysed. Additionally to that the forming limit diagram (FLD) was determined using the bulge test in combination with an optical strain measurement system.  The test results show that lower profile radii can be achieved in the roll forming process compared to simple V- die bending. For both the V-die bending and the roll forming process the forming strains at failure exceeded the forming limits suggested by the FLD.