Deformation mechanism of hot spinning of NiTi shape memory alloy tube based on FEM

As a successively and locally plastic deformation process, ball spinning is applied to manufacturing thin-walled Nickel-Titanium shape memory alloy (NiTi SMA) tube at high temperature. NiTi SMA tube blank belongs to the as-cast state which consists of a lot of dendritic grains and a few equiaxed grains. The compression tests of NiTi SMA were carried out at various strain rates at high temperature in order to obtain the constitutive model of NiTi SMA. Because NiTi SMA is sensitive to the strain rates at high temperature, rigid-viscoplastic finite element method (FEM) is used to simulate ball spinning of thin-walled NiTi SMA tube in order to analyze the deformation behavior of ball spinning of NiTi SMA tube. Stress fields, strain fields as well as velocity fields is obtained by means of rigid-viscoplastic FEM, which lays the profound foundations for studying the metal flow rule in ball spinning and forming perfect spun NiTi SMA tube.