Incremental Forming of Polymer-Numerical and Experimental Investigation

Abstract

In current competitive market every day a new design and manufacturing concept is evolved in polymer processing technology. The industries to cater the need of customers, apart from conventional polymer part manufacturing processes they are in need to develop new manufacturing techniques. This necessitates the need for new flexible polymer processing method that reduces design and manufacturing lead time. Research is on to develop new innovative process strategies and methods in the area of polymer processing. Such one technology is incremental forming (IF) of polymers. In this incremental polymer sheet forming process there is no need to develop dedicated dies and moulds. As a result high investment on moulds and dies was totally eliminated. It is a very much flexible part forming process and is enabled with the help of Computer Numerical Control (CNC) technology. In this paper, numerical and experimental investigations are carried out for the applicability of Incremental forming in polymer part manufacturing. A Finite Element (FE) model is developed for the 3-D numerical simulation of incremental forming process of polymers using commercial software HYPERFORM. The developed model can predict the thickness distribution and percentage thinning of the blank. The FEA results and experimental results are compared for validation with the part design parameters (geometrical and physical parameters). Furthermore, this numerical simulation predicts the failure of polymers in IF process and it is verified with experimental results. By this numerical simulation, failure prediction can be done without expensive shop trials.