Design for FDM of flexible tooling for manufacturing aeronautical components by incremental sheet forming

Abstract

Nowadays, industrial production is required to reduce industrialization times and development costs for new products while maintaining high quality standards. In this context, the development of new flexible manufacturing technologies has gained relevance in the last few years. The use of Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) additive technique has been recently proposed in different industrial sectors for manufacturing rapid tooling (dies) to be used in conventional sheet metal stamping or stretching processes with a significant decrease in costs and time savings. On the other hand, Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) technology is characterized by an enhanced formability of the parts thus manufactured as well as for the need of a small number of tooling, reducing costs compared to conventional processes such as hydroforming or stamping. In particular, its simplest variant, Single-Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) requires the use of backing plates, which do not require tight tolerances as their only function is to collaborate in the deformation process acting as a support point. Furthermore, the strength requirements are also not a limitation since the forces involved in SPIF are very small given the local nature of the deformation. In this context, the main objective of this work is the design of a modular tooling system, manufactured using the FDM additive technique, that allows the flexible manufacturing of different aeronautical components by SPIF.