Review on strategies for geometric accuracy improvement in incremental sheet forming

Incremental sheet forming (ISF) is a promising flexible manufacturing technology for producing sheet components in small batches with no need of high-cost dedicated dies or tooling. A large number of studies with different strategies have been conducted and reported to improve the achievable geometric accuracy in ISF in the past decades, however, the low geometric accuracy still remains the major issue of ISF, which significantly limits the industrial application of this flexible forming technology. This paper aims to present a comprehensive review on the strategies for improving the forming accuracy of ISF to capture the current research status and development in the geometric accuracy improvement in ISF. The reviewed strategies were systematically divided into several different categories, and the representative studies in each category were described and discussed in detail. This work will provide a helpful research guideline for the researchers in the fields of ISF and sheet forming to find better solutions for addressing the poor accuracy problem, and furthermore, boosting the industrial take-up of ISF in the future.