Analysis of electromagnetic force and experiments in electromagnetic forming with local loading

Electromagnetic forming (EMF) is a processing technology using pulsed electromagnetic force to achieve a high forming speed. It draws wide attention because it significantly improves metal material formability. At present, the electromagnetic force is ordinarily generated in the whole workpiece area during the EMF process, which results in a conical contour of formed workpiece with poor forming performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a method named Electromagnetic Forming with Local Loading (EMFLL), in which the electromagnetic force is mainly generated in the specific area of the workpiece. By using ANSYS Software, it gives the simulations for the analysis of the magnetic flux density distribution and the electromagnetic force distribution in the EMFLL process with the new type of coil. The obtained results show that the electromagnetic force generated by the new type of coil is more concentrated. Finally, a series of experiments on the traditional EMF and EMFLL of AA5052 with a diameter of 160 mm and a thickness of 2 mm has been carried out, the experimental results show that a well-proportioned deformation at the bottom of the workpiece is achieved by EMFLL, which verifies that EMFLL has some certain potential in lightweight alloy processing.