Hydroforming has attracted the attention of manufacturing industries for vehicles and transportation systems. A wide range of products such as subframes, camshafts, radiator frames, axles and crankshafts are made by the hydroforming process. Hydroformed parts often need to be structurally joined to other components during assembly. Therefore it is useful if the hydroformed automotive parts can be attached with a localized flange. In this study, a hydroforming process to produce a rectangular shape flange is proposed. FE analysis to form the flanged rectangular shape was performed by Dynaform 5.5. The hydroforming characteristics at various die aspect ratios and feeding conditions were analyzed and optimal process conditions which can avoid defects are suggested. For validation purposes, hydroforming experiments to form the flange were conducted with the optimized conditions. The results show that the flanged parts can be successfully formed with a hydroforming process without additional processing steps.

Tube hydroforming is a technology that utilizes hydraulic pressure to form a tube into desired shapes inside die cavities. Due to its advantages, such as weight reduction, increased strength, improved quality, and reduced tooling cost, singlelayered tube hydroforming is widely used in industry. However in some special applications, it is necessary to produce multi-layered tubular components which have corrosion resistance, thermal resistance, conductivity, and abrasion resistance. In this study, a hollow forming process to fabricate a part from multi-layered tubes for structural purposes is proposed. To accomplish a successful hydroforming process, an analytical model that predicts optimal load path for various parameters such as tube material properties, thickness of tubes, diameter of holes and the number of holes was developed. Tubular hydroforming experiments to fabricate a hollow part were performed and the optimal loading path developed by the analytical model was successfully verified. The results show that the proposed hydroforming process can effectively produce hollow parts with multi-layered tube without defects such as wrinkling or fracture.