TAF PUBLISHING

As a new rapid prototyping technology, Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) gains considerable investigation and development as its simple manufacturing tools, low cost, etc. To predict the quality of the manufacturing finished products and reduce experimental costs, many scholars and companies applied and investigated numerical simulation of SPIF. However, many problems emerge like extremely long simulation time, difficulties in forecasting profile geometry and thickness variation, etc. A long way needs to explore to improve the accuracy of SPIF simulation. Focus on this target, and this paper studied the influences of shell thickness integration rules (Simpson and Gauss), sheet thickness, and element types (with reduction and full reduction) on simulation accuracy. For the experiment, a top diameter of 115 mm, bottom diameter of 12mm, and 27 mm high cone part was formed on a customized three-axis CNC milling machine. Contourgraph was used to obtain profile geometry. Then the deformed part was cut, and a micrometer was used to obtain thickness distribution along with the profile of the formed sheet, respectively. For simulation, shell elements were employed to simulate SPIF explicit simulation. Furthermore, Simpson and Gauss rules integral in thickness direction were used for simulating the same geometry part, and the results were compared. Average Absolute Relative Error (AARE) was used to compare all the profiles and thickness from simulations and experiments, and it can be found that element types with reduction integration can get more accurate results and cost less time. Furthermore, the Gauss integration rule along shell thickness is more accurate than the Simpson rule. Therefore, to achieve greater accuracy, it is recommended to use the Gauss integration rule and reduction integration element (S4R) to predict the profile geometry and thickness prediction in SPIF dynamic explicit simulation.