Study of Deformation Stability during Semi-Dieless Drawing of Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Wire

A semi-dieless drawing technology has the advantages of producing a large deformation in a single pass and achieving high-precision dimensions of the finished products. However, instabilities can easily occur in a technique with a large amount of deformation, resulting in its failure. Herein, the deformation behavior of a wire during semi-dieless drawing is studied by finite element simulations. The instability mechanism of the semi-dieless drawing is proposed and validated by experiments. The experiments are conducted under the following conditions: a heating temperature of 950 °C; a distance between the die and heating coil of 20 mm; a feeding speed of 0.25 mm/s; a drawing speed range of 0.38-0.53 mm/s, and a die diameter range of 1.8-2.4 mm. The results show that by increasing the drawing speed or decreasing die diameter, the diameter fluctuation of the dieless drawn wire increases, and the semi-dieless drawing process easily becomes unstable. The diameter of the entering wire shows a fluctuating increasing trend owing to the variation in the drawing speed, which results in the instability during the semi-dieless drawing. The validity of the finite element model is verified by comparing the numerically predicted value and experimentally measured value of the drawn wire diameter.