Abstract:Backward ball spinning was applied for manufacturing thin-walled tubular parts with longitudinal inner ribs. Rigid-plastic finite element method(FEM) was used for simulating the backward ball spinning process in order to calculate the height of the inner ribs. With a view to guarantee a better simulation accuracy, it is essential to enhance and improve some general problems of FEM, such as generation of initial velocity field, choice of penalty factor, determination of boundary conditions, treatment of rigid region and description of convergence criteria. It is evident that whether the problems with respect to FEM are dealt with appropriately or not, they have a significant influence on the modeling accuracy and efficiency. By reasonable solving the general problems, rigid-plastic FEM can successfully simulate the height of the inner ribs and the calculated values are in good agreement with the measured values.

Key words: ball spinning; tube spinning; power spinning; finite element method; longitudinal inner ribs