Virtual Manufacturing of Cranial Prosthesis by Reverse Engineering and Multipoint Forming

Abstract

The applications areas of the multipoint forming technology are very large, due to its flexibility, one of them being medicine, with the field of cranioplasty. For reconstruction of a skull part, a deformed sheet metal part made from titanium alloy could be used. The paper investigates virtual steps in obtaining the sheet metal part for this scope. First the part skull is measured and using reverse engineering is recreated. Then using an original algorithm and a program, the geometry of the mutipoint die is obtained. A FEM analysis is made for the study of the titanium sheet metal behaviour in multipoint forming. The virtual part quality is evaluated in terms of springback and stresses state variation. The results are important for the real implementation of this technology in manufacturing cranial prostheses.