Probabilistic design of uncertainty for aluminum alloy sheet in rubber fluid forming process

The exclusion of variations in the deterministic design method can lead to very unreliable result and instability quality. This paper proposes a probabilistic design approach for the uncertainties of rubber fluid forming process. The uncertainties consist of the inherent variations of incoming material properties, the process parameters variations and other random variations. This paper presents the probabilistic model and related models to analyze the effect of controllable factors and noise factors to rubber fluid forming process. In order to obtain the probabilistic distribution of noise factors, this paper investigates different coil-to-coil specimens of 2B06-Oaluminum alloy in tensile test. The controllable factors and noise factors can be screened by Plackett-Burman method when the noise factors are too many. By the proposed probabilistic design approach, deeper understanding about the relationship between uncertainties with the part quality is achieved. This paper reduces the sensitivity of inputs variations to quality evaluation index through response surface method and the multi-objective optimization methods. Ultimately, in order to verify the probabilistic design approach into practical usage, a typical curved flanging part of 2B06-O aluminum alloy sheet is applied by the experiment, which shows the proposed method can be used to improved quality and processing optimization.