Deformation and Springback Behavior of Sheet Metal With Convex-Shaped Surfaces in Heat-Assisted Incremental Bending Process Based on Minimum Energy Method

Three-dimensional sheet metal forming is one of the biggest challenges in the shipbuilding industry. The forming quality of the traditionally applied line heating method depends entirely on the skills of the technicians. Moreover, this approach is inefficient and error-prone. This calls for a need to develop new forming technologies that are easy to control and more efficient. In this paper, a novel forming method called heat-assisted incremental bending is presented. The minimum energy loading path of bidirectional curvature sheet along the direction of Gaussian curvature is adapted to deform the sheet metals with a convex shape surface. Besides, the auxiliary heating method and the auxiliary supporting are exclusively included in the forming process to improve the formability and accuracy. In this study, the convex-shaped sheet metal with large curvature is obtained along the two loading trajectories in two principal curvature directions, respectively. Results proved that using the minimum energy loading trajectory and including the auxiliary supports and heating can reduce the forming force to the greatest extent and effectively reduce the number of stamping points, thus improving the sheet metal forming efficiency and forming accuracy.