Sheet metal forming

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sheet metal forming refers to various processes used to convert sheet metal into different shapes for a large variety of finished parts such as aluminium cans and automobile body panels. Key to the formability of sheet metal is its ductility.

Typical forming processes include:

Stamping
Bending
Spinning
Stretching
Drawing
Ironing
Wheeling
Roll Forming
Incremental Sheet Forming

One recent sheet metal forming technique is called Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF), and is named because it forms sheet metal by a large series of small incremental deformations. Generally, the sheet metal is formed by a round tipped tool typically about 5 mm in diameter. The tool, which can be attached to a CNC machine, a robot arm or similar, indents into the sheet by about 1 mm and follows a contour for the desired part. It then indents further and draws the next contour for the part into the sheet and continues to do this until the full part is formed. A key benefit of this is that the machine needed is relatively cheap and it uses no special tooling, making the process very economical. Since ISF is still under much development it is being investigated by many academic institutes and not widely used in industry, although it has generated lots of interest. Some more information is available at www.eng.ox.ac.uk/control.