Study For Novel Incremental Sheet Metal Bending Process And Programming Design

A novel incremental sheet metal bending process for manufacture of hull plates has been proposed based on the concept of flexible forming technology.This forming method has played a more and more significant role in the shipbuilding industry due to its high automation,high efficiency and high forming quality.This paper makes a comprehensive study for novel incremental sheet metal bending process,mainly including tool path design,finite element method(FEM)research and experimental study.The tool path,which controls the movements of the tools in the complete forming process,plays a critical role in forming quality and efficiency,hence needs to be designed reasonably.A numerical simulation software is also established to deepen the understanding of forming mechanism.Due to the fact that the current incremental forming machine can only process the sheet metal with a small dimension,the simulation software will help us to fully understand the forming process of sheet metal with bigger dimension as well as forming parameters.Finally,the experimental studies are also carried out and the experimental results are shown in this paper.This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of novel incremental sheet metal bending process and provides a solid basis for further studies in the future.