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.

Investigations on formability of tailor laminated sheets in single point incremental forming

“…Decrease in ductility and formability was observed for cold rolled sheet compared to that of parent sheet. Sridhar and Rajenthirakumar 12 investigated the applicability of incremental forming to make products of polymeric sheets, experimentally and numerically. Thickness distribution, percentage thinning, and failure predicted by simulation were in good agreement with the experimental results.…”

Incremental sheet forming of thermoplastics: a review

“…Since then, ISF of thermoplastic materials has attracted increased attention for possible applications mainly because of its advantages including good resistance to impact and to temperature and bearing capacity [23,24]. In recent years, many researchers extended the scope to investigate the use of ISF to process different kinds of thermoplastics including polypropylene (PP), polyoxymethylene (POM), polyamide (PA), polycarbonate (PC), polyvinylchloride (PVC) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) [25][26][27][28]. Yonan et al [29] compared the main thermoplastic material processing technologies from the technical and economic aspects.…”

A Review on Plastic Behavior of Polymer Sheets and Forming Process

“…In addition, a mold cannot be used for another shape. To reduce the cost, some researchers started studying incremental forming for polymers [9,10]. Figure 3 shows the concept of the incremental forming.…”