Room-Temperature Formability Of High-Strength Titanium Alloy Sheets
Aug 11, 2025
Titanium sheet is widely recognized for its high strength, light weight, and excellent structural rigidity. The high-strength titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V is not only used in the aviation industry but is also a key candidate for structural components in other industries, such as the automotive and chemical industries.
The formability of Ti-6Al-4V alloy sheet at room temperature is very limited, and significant springback after forming presents numerous challenges with traditional stamping and press forming. Although the forming limit of Ti-6Al-4V alloy sheet increases and springback decreases at elevated temperatures, room-temperature forming still offers significant cost advantages. Roll forming, a forming method that uses rotating rolls to gradually deform a metal blank into a workpiece, is suitable for forming high-strength structural components with limited formability. It is increasingly used in the automotive industry, primarily for forming ultra-high-strength and high-strength steels. Because the springback angle during rolling is minimal and can be easily compensated for, rolling is an effective method for forming Ti-6Al-4V alloy sheet at room temperature. To this end, Ossama et al. conducted a laboratory study on the forming and springback behavior of 2mm-thick high-strength Ti-6Al-4V alloy sheets annealed at 820°C at room temperature.
The Ti-6Al-4V alloy sheet used in the experiment had an initial microstructure composed of 93.86% equiaxed α phase and 6.14% β phase, with an average grain size of 1.3μm ± 0.7μm. Room-temperature tensile testing revealed significant anisotropy, with the yield strength at a 45° angle to the rolling direction being the lowest and the elongation being the highest. Upon reaching the ultimate strength, the specimen fractured rapidly. Forming limit testing was performed using a device equipped with a hemispherical punch with a diameter of 60mm. An optical strain measurement system, "Autogrid Vario," equipped with four advanced CCD cameras, was used to record the complete deformation history of each specimen. Different specimen geometries were designed to test deformation behavior along various strain paths. Experimental results revealed that all specimens fractured suddenly at the tip of the hemispherical punch, with no apparent shrinkage before fracture, indicating that the room-temperature formability of the alloy is very limited. The deformation behavior of Ti-6Al-4V alloy sheets during room-temperature bending and roll forming was compared. Results showed that the minimum bending radius in pendulum folding and V-die bending tests was 9 mm, while that in roll forming was 7.51 mm, an improvement of over 15%. Roll forming can form smaller radii and exhibits less springback than simple bending. This is primarily due to the fact that roll forming involves a multi-step cumulative deformation process. The gradual, multiple deformation steps can suppress crack growth and provide more complete deformation than a single deformation step. Furthermore, the morphological defects commonly seen in high-strength steel rolling are relatively rare in the roll forming of Ti-6Al-4V alloy. This suggests that roll forming is a promising process for room-temperature forming of high-strength titanium alloy sheets for aerospace and automotive structural components.
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