Investigation of tool wear in single point incremental sheet forming

This article presents a proposal for a new method to evaluate tool wear incremental sheet forming process. Incremental sheet forming is an innovative forming process with a high interest in fields of the industry due to its low preparation cost and high flexibility, allowing the production of small batches at a reduced cost. Among the various types of incremental sheet forming processes, the single point incremental sheet forming is the most cost-effective, and unfortunately, the single point incremental sheet forming process has high dimensional errors. In order to understand the process and its dimensional errors better, this article shows the study of tool wear and the quality of surface finish with the generated data can correlate with the tool life. The study is carried out by means of a sequence of experimental tests of galvanized steel sheet conformation by altering the stamping parameters (vertical step in, feed and rotation) and capturing the values of the surface roughness of the parts, the forming tool wear and processing time. After the completion of the tests, the classical formulation of the Taylor equation was utilized to obtain a mathematical model capable of estimating the lifetime of the single point incremental sheet forming tool associated with a tool wear value and the desired dimensional accuracy in relation to the processing parameters for the part or tool pair analyzed in a computer numerical control machine tool. The results of the study present an original model of prediction of tool wear in relation to the input parameters for the single point incremental sheet forming process; the overall error rate is 33.44% for the wear model of prediction and 35.94% for the lifetime model of prediction.