Executive Summary : | The automotive, aerospace, and appliance industries use sheet metal forming processes to produce complex three-dimensional shape products from flat sheets. The traditional stamping process used for producing sheet metal parts is effective only for mass production due to the requirement of expensive dies. For low volume production requirements (less than 1000 parts) the traditional stamping process is less attractive with regard to the time, energy, and cost involved in production. This project is focused on exploring the new manufacturing process developed in the recent past for small volume production runs called "Incremental forming". There are many variants in incremental forming process such as Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF), Double Sided Incremental Forming (DSIF), Two-Point Incremental Forming (TPIF) with low cost dies, Multi-Stage Incremental Forming (MSIF), High Temperature Incremental Forming (HT-IF) etc. Most of the studies in incremental forming are restricted to small size components with forming areas less than 0.0625 m² (250 mm X 250 mm). However, most of the sheet metal components used in automotive and aerospace industries range from 0.5 m X 0.5 m to 1 m X 1 m. Therefore, the current project is focused on forming the different shape of sheet metal parts with sizes 0.5 m X 0.5 m, 0.8 m X 0.3 m and 1 m X 1 m (part sizes in the range of 0.5 m X 0.5 m to 1 m X 1 m). The parts will be formed with Deep Drawing steel (DD Steel). Aluminum (AA1100) and commercially pure titanium (CP Ti) which are widely used in automotive and aerospace industries. For practical use of these parts, it is very important to manufacture the parts with good dimensional accuracy and surface finish. One of the major limitations of the incremental forming process is low dimensional accuracy. To get good dimensional accuracy, two-point incremental forming with low cost dies will be used in the current project. The formed component will be scanned with an Artec spider 3D scanner and compared with the CAD model using Geomagic Control X software to evaluate the profile deviations. Based on the profile deviations, tool path and die geometry will be optimized. The target of the current project is to limit the profile deviations to 1 mm. Another important limitation of incremental forming over the traditional stamping process is low surface finish. The current project aims to produce the parts with athematic mean surface roughness (Ra) less than 20 microns by using forming tools with rotating ball tips and appropriate lubricants. Before tooling fabrication and manufacturing the parts, finite element models will be developed in LS-DYNA to analyze the form accuracy of the targeted parts. The tool path strategies and die designs will be optimized based on the simulation results. After finite element simulations, required tooling (forming tools, sheet holding fixtures, and dies) will be designed and fabricated to carry out the forming operations. |
Co-PI: | Dr. Amrita Priyadarshini, Birla Institute Of Technology & Science Pilani (BITS), Hyderabad Campus, Telangana-500078, Dr. Swadesh Kumar Singh, Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute Of Engineering And Technology, Hyderabad, Telangana-500090 |