ABSTRACT Aluminum alloys have been used for the Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) process due to their formability, corrosion resistance, less weight and its isotropic mechanical properties. The proposed research work aims to experimentally investigate the optimisation of the process inputs affecting the quality of the SPIF incrementally formed surface. The experimentation was performed to optimise parameters under varying conditions, focusing on various process factors. The surface roughness (SR) has been found most significantly affected by the tool diameter, followed by vertical step size, side wall angle, feed rate, and rotational spindle speed. Experimentation result shows the outstanding values of the experimental set-up for surface finish found on the base of the ANOVA at 70° cone angle under the test setting of a TD of 13.0 mm, a VSS of 0.50 mm, RSS of 1000 rpm, and a FR of 2500 mm/min. The parametric optimisation for SR with Desirability approach, TLBO (Teacher learner-based optimisation), and ACO (ant colony optimisation) methods has been attempted, out of which the best optimum value (with ACO) for SR was achieved as 0.162 µm at the optimal parametric settings of TD = 14.75 mm, VSS = 0.660 mm, RSS = 521.70 rpm, FR = 2760 mm/min, and WA = 76.56°.
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