Extrusion of Magnesium Hollow Profiles for Automotive Applications

The use and adoption of magne sium extruded profiles in structural application is limited because magnesium extrusion technology is at its first. Once extruded hollow sections will be available at a reasonable cost, a tremendous in crease of market demand is going to be expected due to the lowest weight of the magnesium alloys in comparison with aluminum based ones. The press productivity re present a key factor in this scope and the die, due to the strong incidence of strain and temperature in the extrudability, will play a basic role to achieve the required stem speed. This paper present a new approach for designing extrusion dies specifically for magnesium alloy ZM21 by means of FEM simulation. The goodness of the new design has been validated extruding an hollow profile using an industrial press with data logging.