Analysis of optimal metal flow in incremental sheet forming

Abstract

AbstractSheet metal forming processes are manufacturing processes in which a piece of sheet metal is shaped to a specified geometry, e.g. a car door. A promising new forming process is incremental sheet metal forming, in which the deformation is imposed by a progressive, localised plastic deformation induced by a pin‐like forming tool that moves under numerical control along a pre‐defined trajectory. This process offers the possibility to control the metal flow by adjusting the trajectory of the forming tool. Mathematically, sheet metal forming processes can be considered as a mapping between the initial, undeformed sheet metal and the final, deformed state. In most applications the surface area of the sheet metal is enlarged during the deformation. In this case, an ideal mapping would produce a homogeneous stretching of the sheet metal such that the final sheet thickness is the same everywhere. In this work, we analyze the following question: for each point in the initial configuration, what must be its location on the final geometry such that the thickness is the same everywhere? We construct a special type of surface evolution that combines flow along the surface normal with appropriate tangential velocity corrections, and show that the flow yields a constant sheet thinning on a sheet metal. (© 2013 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)