Formability Discussion in Dieless Drawing of Stainless Steel Tubes

Abstract

Stainless steel tubes are widely used in various fields, such as electrode tubes, probe tubes, electronic parts, painless injection needles, and micro-nozzles etc. In this study, a self-developed prototype dieless drawing machine is used to explore the formability of the dieless drawing process of SUS304 stainless steel tubes. The critical process parameters of the forming temperature, drawing velocity, the drawing accelerations and area reduction are investigated. A commercial finite element code of DEFORM 3D is used to simulate the temperature, stress, strain distributions and drawing velocity limit in the dieless drawing process of the stainless steel tubes. The maximum area reduction obtained can reach 50% and the better forming temperatures are between 1000°C and 1100 °C.