Study of Alternatives to Manufacturing of Long Pipes with Many Holes

Abstract In industrial manufacturing, certain long, thin-walled pipe-type parts that have many holes arranged along their longitudinal axis are required. In the automotive industry, such thin-walled long pipe parts are needed for body frames, for heavier component supports, for protection bars, etc. Frequent cases are encountered, for example, in the manufacture of modular shelves for storage. In these cases, long pipes, up to 6 meters long, with thin walls are used. Such long thin-walled pipes, which have many holes arranged along them, sometimes even equally spaced between them, are frequently made with a manufacturing technology that has several characteristic steps: 1) making holes in sheet metal strips, 2) bending the strips and welding them lengthwise, resulting in perforated pipes having a rectangular or square section. In this paper, two variants of obtaining pipes with holes arranged along the length of the pipe, but which are obtained from laminated pipes with thin walls of rectangular section, are proposed and analyzed. The characteristics of obtaining holes in these pipes are presented and the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solutions are analyzed. The finite element method was also used for the analysis using SolidWorks software.