Forming Surface Texture on Copper Sheets by Electrically Assisted Micro-Rolling

Electrically assisted (EA) forming is a promising process due to its advantages, such as reducing forming load, increasing formability, and decreasing springback. In order to reduce material waste and environmental pollution in the manufacturing process of surface texture, the EA micro-rolling process was used to form surface texture on T2 copper sheets. The EA micro-rolling system consisted of a micro-rolling device and a power supply. Effects of the voltage, frequency, and pulse duration on feature height were investigated. Compared with conventional micro-rolling, the EA micro-rolling process increased the feature height significantly, improved the flatness of the sheet with surface texture, and decreased the surface roughness remarkably. The influences of electric current for different grain sizes were not identical. The rise of feature height was more significant for rolled sheets than that for annealed sheets. Moreover, the feature height has little variations under voltage magnitude of this study when the grain size was greater. This study proves that forming quality of surface textured sheets can be improved under appropriate electric parameters and the EA micro-rolling process would be a promising surface texturing method.