FEM Modelling and Experimental Analysis of an AA5083 Turbine Blade from ECAP Processed Material

Abstract

Abstract This present research work deals with the design by finite element method (FEM) of the dies required for the isothermal forging of a Francis turbine blade taking into account that the starting material has been previously nanostructured through severe plastic deformation by equal channel angular extrusion. This nanostructured material possesses improved mechanical properties and hardness, better forgeability, and, under specific conditions, a superplastic behavior. Once this material is obtained, its flow rule has been determined through compression tests at different temperature values along with its subsequent fitting with artificial neural networks. Later on, these rules will be employed in the FEM simulations included in this present study. Furthermore, the results of the processing of these materials are shown comparing the properties of the mechanical components after their isothermal forging at different temperature values both with predeformed and non-predeformed material. This work is at the cutting-edge of technology because there are only a few technical papers about forging applications of nanostructured material. Keywords: ECAPFEMForgingIsothermalSPD Notes Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/lmmp.