Bulge testing of superplastic AA5083 aluminum sheet

Bulge testing has been used to evaluate the superplastic properties of AA5083 aluminum sheet alloys for high-volume automotive production applications. The constant-pressure pneumatic bulge test provides a faster, simpler, and less expensive measure of the material's high temperature ductility than conventional tensile testing. A correlation was established between tensile elongation and bulge test dome height for AA5083 aluminum sheet based on an evaluation of twenty five materials. The ability of the bulge test to differentiate reliably among high and low quality production and experimental alloys was demonstrated. A tendency for some materials to deform at significantly different strain rates under the same conditions of forming temperature and pressure was examined.