Heat-assisted incremental bending of metal plates with unsymmetrical curvatures

Abstract

Small-batched metal plates with free-form surfaces are widely used in different manufacturing industries; however, it is unrealistic to produce such metal plates based on traditional die stamping and rolling processes. Over the last few decades, numerous efforts have been adopted to produce the metal plates with free-form surfaces with acceptable quality, efficiency, and cost through flexible forming processes. In the present paper, a heat-assisted incremental bending process was proposed to manufacture metal plates with large unsymmetrical curvatures. The test metal plates were supported by some hydraulic cylinders, and the punch moved up and down to press the metal plates according to the loading path determined by the minimum energy method. In addition, an induction heating system was applied to heat the metal plates at the punching position. One objective metal plate with large unsymmetrical curvature is deformed based on the heat-assisted incremental bending experiments. The obtained results indicate that the proposed thermo-mechanical flexible forming process could produce complex metal plates with good accuracy and high efficiency.