Numerical simulation and experimental research on water jet forming of copper foil

In order to solve the problems of die and tooling manufacturing and assembling for the foil forming, especially for the foil micro forming, high-pressure water jet forming (HPWJF), a new die-less forming process for foil parts is proposed. In the forming process, liquid medium such as water and oil is utilized as a flexible tool to deform the ultrathin foil. In this paper, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software Fluent was used to simulate the water jet generation in the water jet nozzle and high-speed water impacting on a rigid surface. And then, the effects of jetting distance on the jetting pressure were obtained. To measure the precise mechanical parameters of copper foils, a digital speckle test method was used to detect the tensile process. Local bulging experiment was conducted for the copper foil with a thickness of 50 mu m. When the inlet pressure is 8.5 MPa, the suitable jetting distance is 40 mm for the 50-mu m-thick copper foil. In such conditions, the bulging height of the copper foil is 1.20 mm in the experiment. The fluid-solid coupled method by using Fluent and Abaqus was applied to simulate the deformation of the copper foil. The errors between the simulated results and the experimental values are lower than 10 %. Furthermore, both the experiment and simulation for micro stretching of 30-mu m-thick copper foil were performed. The cylinder die with a diameter of 3 mm and a height of 1.5 mm is used to form the copper foil. Results show that the copper foil cracks when the jetting distance is 24 mm, and the inlet pressure is 12 MPa. With the increase of the inlet pressure, the drawing depth of the copper foil gradually increases, and the bottom of the cylinder part thins gradually, and the wrinkling of the flange of the cylinder part becomes more and more severe.