QUALITY ASSESSMENT AND OPTIMIZATION OF AN INDUSTRIAL EXTRUDED PROFILE

The extrusion process is an economic maunfacturing method used to produce profiles with a constant section. However, even when simple components are considered, many process and product issues can emerge such as low mechanical properties or distorsions of the exit profile, die premature failure and/or low production rates. These problems are related to the complex nature of the process that has to guarantee, at the same time, proper conditions for a good welding (in case of hollow profiles), absence of profile distorsions, an acceptable die stress and as much as possible fast extrusion. In addition, all these conditions have to be reached in the short extrusion time of each single billet and can emerge to be conflicting one each other’s. Usually, the optimization of the extrusion process is performed by the operators on the basis of consolidated experience and empirical rules. However, in this way, it is extremely difficult to control all the process and geometrical parameters involved and then to control the final outputs. This explains the number of works in literature aimed to develop numerical and analytical models for the extrusion process optimization. In this context, the authors recently presented a novel procedure for the multi-goal optimization of extrusion dies based on meta-models that was preliminary validated on the experimental results available for a simple round tube profile. In this work, two additional test cases are presented with the aim to extended the validation cases of the proposed procedure to a more complex industrial profile