Experimental and analytical evaluation of Incremental Sheet Hydro-Forming strategies to produce high forming angle sheets

Abstract

Incremental Sheet Hydro-Forming (ISHF) is a hybrid process of Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) and Sheet Hydro-Forming (SHF). In the ISHF process, a single ball tool moves over one side of the surface of the sheet and hydraulic support is provided in another by using the pressurized hydraulic fluid. In the current research, an attempt has been made to achieve high forming angles using ISHF. The forming strategy, multi-stage & multi-step (MSMS), has been proposed to improve the formability in ISHF. The MSMS has resulted in the improvement in the formability and forming angle achieved is 78.75o. The primary issue, identified in MSMS forming strategy, is the failure of the product due to thinning of the sheet. To address the failure of the sheet due to thinning, a modified version of MSMS was proposed. This modified version of MSMS has shown tremendous improvement in the formability of the ISHF. The forming angle upto 90o has been successfully achieved using the modified version of MSMS. Analytical models have been developed for MSMS forming strategy and for the modified version of MSMS forming strategy. The experimental results are closely the same as predicted by analytical models.