Research on a Composite Power-Superimposed Ultrasonic Vibrator for Wire Drawing

Vibration power and amplitude are essential factors in ultrasonic drawing processes, especially for difficult-to-draw materials like titanium and its alloys. This paper presents a new composite power-superimposed ultrasonic vibrator for wire drawing which was driven by three separate ultrasonic transducers. The transducers were uniformly distributed around the circular cross section of the vibrator, with their axes along the radial direction and pointing to the center. The vibrator can concentrate the vibrational energy of multiple transducers and transform the radial vibration into a longitudinal vibrator because of the Poisson effect and therefore output larger vibration power and amplitude. In the paper, the four-terminal network method was used to establish the vibration equations of the vibrator. The FE model was established in ANSYS to investigate its characteristics under various excitation conditions. A prototype was manufactured and measurements were performed to verify the validation of FEA results. The results matched well with the theoretical results. It was found that the composite vibrator achieved an amplitude of about 40 μm when driven by square wave signals with 120 ̋ in phase difference, which implies a potential way of applying ultrasonic vibration to the processing of difficult-to-draw materials.