Experimental and numerical study on one flexible incremental bending process

In the shipbuilding industry, the traditional manufacturing method for the complicated ship hull metal plates is line heating method, which is not only labor intensive but also inefficient. Considerable efforts have been taken to develop the new automated manufacturing processes at a reasonable quality, efficiency and price during the last few decades. This paper presents a novel flexible forming process called incremental bending to achieve complicated plates. In this method, the initial metal plate is supported by some rotatable hydraulic cylinders and the punches move according to the given path, which is decided by minimum energy method and springback compensation method, to achieve the final plate. Taking one variable curved metal plate as one example, this paper investigates the formability of this novel process based on experiment and numerical simulation. During the numerical simulation, the implicit method is used and the gravity of the plate is considered mainly for the automatic positioning of the plate during each springback process. Results show that the incremental bending process can achieve variable curved metal plates with good accuracy, high efficiency, and relatively small punch load. In comparison with the existing methods, the new process has greater potentiality in the ship hull manufacturing industry.