Effect of Incremental Forming Process Parameters on Aluminum Alloy Using Experimental Studies

Abstract

Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) process is Innovative and cost effective technology trend for forming products in manufacturing industries. The current research is to study and investigate the influence of incremental sheet forming process parameters on response surfaces of aluminium alloy sheet components. In this experiment, Aluminium alloy AA1050 sheet was selected to process forming by using CNC machining centre without expensive dies. Individual and interactive effect of different factors such as, thickness of sheet, tool diameter, vertical step, feed rate, and tool rotational speed at different levels were assessed to improve the processing time. For the design of experiment (DOE), Taguchi’s L27 orthogonal array was used to investigate and optimize the influencing ISF process parameters. From ANOVA results, it was found that for thickness reduction, the influencing factors were as following; feed rate (21.40 %); for roughness, tool rotation speed (20.43 %) and for hardness, thicknesses of sheet (39.49 %). Response Surface Methodology (RSM) showed that optimal values obtained were 0.46 mm, 10 mm, 0.6818 mm, 2232.32 mm/min., and 2626 rpm for thickness of sheet, tool diameter, vertical step, feed rate and tool rotational speed respectively. For percentage thickness reduction of 59.6%, minimum roughness 2.09μm, and maximum hardness 41.7 BHN, the confirmatory test showed values of 64.78 % thickness reduction, roughness of 2.14μm and hardness of 44.82 BHN that were in agreement with the predicted value.