Influencing the forming zone by altering the contact pressure in a bending process

Abstract

In a modern production environment, flexible manufacturing methods are important because an overall trend towards mass customization and on-demand production is observed. Kinematic and incremental forming methods with generic tools can provide a large product variation but a deeper understanding of the forming mechanisms is required for process modelling, e.g. Incremental Swivel Bending (ISB). Particularly crucial is to identify the influences on the forming zone in order to purposefully control the material flow of a forming process. For a bending process where the bending moment is transmitted by clamping tools, this paper presents a method to alter the contact pressure distribution in order to affect the angular size and strain gradient of the forming zone. In the light of these results, the presented method can be deployed for a tooling with adaptive contact pressure to directly influence material flow, in particular using generic tools to overall provide a better control of flexible forming methods.