Multi-objective optimization of crimping of large-diameter welding pipe

Crimping is widely adopted in the production of large-diameter submerged-arc welding pipes. Traditionally, designers obtain the technical parameters for crimping from experience or by trial and error through experiments and the finite element (FE) method. However, it is difficult to achieve ideal crimping quality by these approaches. To resolve this issue, crimping parameter design was investigated by multi-objective optimization. Crimping was simulated using the FE code ABAQUS and the FE model was validated experimentally. A welding pipe made of X80 high-strength pipeline steel was considered as a target object and the optimization problem for its crimping was formulated as a mathematical model and crimping was optimized. A response surface method based on the radial basis function was used to construct a surrogate model; the genetic algorithm NSGA-II was adopted to search for Pareto solutions; grey relational analysis was used to determine the most satisfactory solution from the Pareto solutions. The obtained optimal design of parameters shows good agreement with the initial design and remarkably improves the crimping quality. Thus, the results provide an effective approach for improving crimping quality and reducing design times.