Preliminary Studies on the Determination of FLD for Single Point Incremental Sheet Metal Forming

Development of new technologies and processes for small batch and prototype production of sheet metal components has very important role in the recent years. The reason is the quick and efficient response to the market demands. For this reasons new manufacturing concepts have to be developed in order to enable a fast and reliable production of complex components and parts without investing in special forming machines. The need for flexible forming processes has been accelerated during the last 15 years, and by these developments the technology reaches new extensions. Incremental sheet metal forming may be regarded as one of the promising developments for these purposes. Though, the basic process characteristics have been known for many years, but there are still many open questions to be answered. Therefore, a Joint European Research Project within a EUREKA project proposal was recently started to study the effect of important process parameters with particular emphasis on the shape and dimensional accuracy of the products and particularly on the formability limitations of the process. In this paper, some preliminary results concerning the determination of forming limit diagrams for single point incremental sheet metal forming will be described.