Local Buckling-Induced Forming Method to Produce Metal Bellows

A novel buckling-induced forming method is proposed to produce metal bellows. The tube billet is firstly treated by local heating and cooling, and the axial loading is applied on both ends of the tube, then the buckling occurs at the designated position and forms a convolution. In this paper, a forming apparatus is designed and developed to produce both discontinuous and continuous bellows of 304 stainless steel, and their characteristics are discussed respectively. Furthermore, the influences of process parameters and geometric parameters on the final convolution profile are deeply studied based on FEM analysis. The results suggest that the steel bellows fabricated by the presented buckling-induced forming method have a uniform shape and no obvious reduction of wall thickness. Meanwhile, the forming force required in the process is quite small.