If you don’t have an intuitive understanding of spinning forming technology, then you can imagine the scene of shaping pottery during pottery making: on a rapidly rotating blanking machine, a ball of clay is constantly changing shape in the hands of potters. The principle of spinning is actually the same as this ancient craft, except that the former is used on metal and the latter on clay.
With its excellent processing characteristics, spinning forming technology has always been an indispensable process in high-precision fields such as military industry and aerospace. Nowadays, with the improvement of technology, spinning technology is also playing an increasingly important role in other fields of manufacturing.
What Is Spinning Technology
Spinning forming technology is to use the feed movement of tools such as rotary wheels to tighten the metal tube blank, flat blank or preform on the spinning mandrel with the tail top, and the spindle drives the mandrel and the blank to rotate, while spinning The pressure roller squeezes the material onto the rotating mandrel from one side of the blank, causing the material to undergo point-by-point continuous plastic deformation, thereby obtaining hollow rotating body parts with various generatrix shapes.
As a new technology in plastic processing, powerful spinning has obvious advantages in the production of thin-walled high-precision rotary parts:
- The strength and hardness of the material after spinning are increased by about 35%~45% compared with the base material, so the spinning technology can effectively reduce the design wall thickness and weight of the part, and its fatigue performance can also be significantly improved;
- Spinning is local continuous processing, the instantaneous deformation zone is small, the total deformation force required is small, the processing equipment requirements are simple, and the mold cost is low;
- Spinning is a non-cutting processing technology, and the material utilization rate is high, which is conducive to reducing production costs;
- The dimensional and shape tolerances of copper spinning parts are relatively small;
- Spinning belongs to axial drawing forming, and the material in the deformation zone is in a state of two-dimensional or three-dimensional compressive stress, so a higher degree of deformation can be achieved.
Application of Spinning Forming Technology
The technological advantages of spinning forming technology in forming rotary parts with thin wall, light weight, high strength, high precision and good fatigue resistance are irreplaceable. Based on many advantages, especially the improvement of the strength, hardness and fatigue resistance of parts after powerful spinning, spinning technology has been widely used in the manufacture of parts in the automotive, military, and aerospace fields.
Materials currently available for spinning include aluminum alloys, magnesium alloys, titanium alloys, copper alloys, low-carbon steels, high-temperature alloys, maraging steels, high-strength steels, ultra-high-strength steels, and stainless steels.
Auto Parts Manufacturing
In the automotive industry, wheel hub manufacturing is an important field of application for spinning forming technology. As one of the three main processes of wheel hub manufacturing, the wheel hub processed by spinning technology combines various technical characteristics such as forging, extrusion, stretching, cross rolling, rolling, etc., with good quality, high flexibility, light weight and strong rigidity. and many other advantages. The wheel hub formed by spinning not only reduces the amount of processing and saves materials, but also can maintain the compactness of the metal and the dynamic balance of the wheel hub. In addition, while the spinning hub has sufficient rigidity, it is more convenient to control the wall thickness of the hub, making the weight lighter. The weight of the former can be reduced by 15% for the same size aluminum alloy spinning wheel and casting wheel.
Aviation Parts Manufacturing
Spinning forming technology has been widely used in aerospace manufacturing. For example, in terms of aero-engines, propeller caps, casings, lips, intake cones, nozzles, nozzles, etc. are all partially formed by spinning. This kind of parts has special materials and large size. After the spinning forming process, the integrity of the structural parts is improved, the deformation of welds and parts is reduced, and the workload of manual calibration is reduced. More importantly, due to the spinning The increased strength of the material after pressing can reduce the design wall thickness of the parts, thereby reducing the weight of the whole machine and improving the reliability of the whole machine.
In addition, in aircraft manufacturing, various nose covers, auxiliary fuel tanks, air inlets, gas cylinders, tie rods, slide rails, and actuators have been formed by spinning.
Military aerospace parts manufacturing
The large-scale CNC powerful spinning machine is the necessary equipment for the manufacture of large-scale thin-walled rotary metal structures in the aerospace field. It has the characteristics of high precision, high rigidity and high load of heavy-duty machine tools. It mainly meets the manufacture of large thin-walled rotary parts in aviation, aerospace, shipbuilding, nuclear industry, chemical industry and other industries.
At present, spinning technology, especially powerful spinning technology, is often used to process various spherical or cylindrical gas cylinders, pipe fittings and aero-engines of missile shells, end caps, tank heads, nose cones, nozzles, and pressure vessels. Parts such as nozzles, combustion chamber cones, fairings, compressor disks and turbine shafts.
Previously, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) cooperated with Lockheed Martin to develop a 2195 aluminum-lithium alloy rocket liquid fuel tank dome with a diameter of 5.5m and a depth of 1.6m by using the combination technology of friction stir welding and spinning . Spinning technology is also used in the top parts of Japanese launch vehicles.
China’s spinning technology is in line with the leading level
After decades of development, foreign metal spinning technology has become very mature. The United States, Germany, Spain, etc. all have world-class spinning technology. The spinning machines in these countries have achieved specialization, serialization, stable performance, and easy operation. convenient. Although it started late, my country’s spinning technology has made great progress since entering the new century. Here we must mention the domestic star enterprise in the field of spinning – Guangdong Be-Cu Prototype. Founded in the 1990s, Be-Cu Prototype has become the largest R&D and manufacturing enterprise of spinning machines in Asia, and its output also ranks first in China. At present, the overseas market has accounted for half of the Be-Cu CNC business, and the products are sold to more than 40 countries and regions around the world.
The 3600 vertical spinning process and the 5800 horizontal double-sliding table powerful CNC spinning process launched by Be-Cu in recent years are the best among similar products in Asia. These types of spinning processes all adopt advanced numerical control technology, hydraulic system and control system, with large thrust and high precision, breaking through the technical problems of forming high-temperature alloys, titanium and other non-ferrous and refractory metal spinning products, and greatly improving my country’s metal spinning process. The press-forming ability fills the gap in my country’s major technology of large-scale metal spinning, breaks the technical barriers of foreign countries, and effectively solves the production problems of special spinning products for military use in china.
Now our country has broken through the bottleneck of technological development, and spinning technology has entered a stage of steady development. With the continuous expansion of the application range of spinning technology, higher processing efficiency and better combination with other processing technologies have become new requirements of the current industry. It is believed that after continuous development in the direction of multi-function, flexibility, specialization, automation and serialization, spinning technology will bring more surprises to China’s manufacturing industry.
