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Experimental Investigations on Incremental Sheet Forming of Commercial Aluminum Alloys for Maximum Production Quality

Mohanraj Murugesan, Muhammad Sajjad, and Dong Won Jung
Jeju National University, Mechanical Engineering, Jeju-si, South Korea

Abstract—Single point incremental sheet forming (SPIF) process got a great attraction among other existed sheet metal forming processes because of their flexibility to manufacture complex products. Mass manufacturing can be achieved in terms of small-batch production and prototype products. The work material is formed into the expected mechanical parts using design tools by causing the plastic deformations at the contact locations with the help of designed contour paths. The objective of this research work is to study the formability of commercial aluminum alloy material under various test conditions for investigating the production quality in terms of dimensional accuracy and surface roughness. During the experiments, the wooden cubes are used as a base plate configuration for controlling the free stretching during the forming process. The aluminum alloy material mechanical properties are adopted and integrated into the finite element (FE) code. The tool paths for truncated cone shape are modeled in Fusion 360 software, and the coordinates are converted into 3D punch tool coordinates by the tool path generation framework tool for modeling the numerical simulation. In numerical modeling, three kinds of mesh settings are used to construct the mesh for producing consistent results. Afterward, the obtained results are tested against the experimental observations and the desired parts dimensions to confirm the accuracy of the established FE model. Thickness variations in the formed parts are discussed in detail in terms of the thinning area, thinning location, and its size in percentage. A comparison of tested geometries displays that reduction in thickness tends to be uniform in the wall region and small fluctuation noticed near the tool retraction location. overall, the numerical results of the SPIF process are well agreement with the experimental measurements in terms of geometry dimensions and thickness reduction. In addition, the surface roughness was noticed to be increased when the step size is more extensive, and on the other hand, the machining time tends to be more if the contour step size is small in the SPIF process. 


Index Terms—incremental sheet forming, finite element model, aluminum alloy, thinning location, surface roughness

Cite: Mohanraj Murugesan, Muhammad Sajjad, and Dong Won Jung, "Experimental Investigations on Incremental Sheet Forming of Commercial Aluminum Alloys for Maximum Production Quality," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 9, No. 9, pp. 1264-1270, September 2020. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.9.9.1264-1270

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.