Aluminum tubing is frequently used in situations that depend on high resistance against corrosion, level of versatility, and low cost maintenance. Although there are several standards and specifications to ensure proper manufacturing and usage, there are typically two categories for fabricated tubes, welded and seamless.
Welded aluminum requires alloys are usually set to be melted to certain specifications, depending on what it’s being used for. The basic strip of aluminum that the tubes are formed from is either hot-formed coil or cold-formed coil.
Dependent on whether the tubing is hot formed or cold formed the end results will be different, but the welding process is the same. First, coils are separated into specific widths. Next up is the forming process. To seal up the seams of each tube, welding rolls are needed.
Once this step is complete the tubes are sized, ensuring that they meet the correct dimensions such as diameter, roundness, and straightness. To get the tubing to its final length, we cut it. This step is completed using a variety of techniques. The most common choice is abrasive cutting because it doesn’t require a change in size for each tube. Shear cutting is used frequently because it prevents warping of the tubing.
in cases that welding isn’t used, extrusion, piercing, or drilling can make seamless aluminum tubing. Piercing uses an aluminum bar as its base and holes are pierced in the bar. The pierced bar is rolled and heated to create a tube.
For extrusion an aluminum bar feeds into a tube and works through a die to form the tube. Gun drilling produces the best quality tubes, during this process a round metal bar is inserted into a flute drill.
Even though this process is more expensive than some of the other options, the end results are usually better than tubes manufactured by any other means.