Experimental and numerical investigation on development of new incremental forming process

Abstract The main subject of the present work is to present the new and innovative manufacturing technology based on the incremental forming approach. The idea is to develop a deformation process that is strictly based on small incremental deformations realized by a series of thin anvils. To realise this idea in practise this idea, a proper geometry of the upper die has to be designed. In the present work it is a set of several rolls (pressure rollers) that moves down towards a series of small anvils and performs rotational movement at the same time. As a result, the pressure is not transferred by the upper die directly to the material. The pressure is transferred to the sample through the series of thin anvils. To incrementally transfer the desired final shape to the forging a series of anvils with various lengths has to be used. Due to the complexity and novelty of the proposed approach, a set of questions has to addressed. These are related to appropriate depth of anvil indentation, material flow under a single anvil, material interaction with anvils and interaction between subsequent anvils. This basic research is done in the present work with the use of simple laboratory tests. Then detailed experimental analysis of material flow in the developed new process is presented. At this stage of the research the prototype of the proposed device is created on the basis of the orbital Marciniak forging press ( Marciniak, 1970 ). All the obtained results are presented, and conclusions related to the effectiveness of the process are highlighted. The experimental part of the research is also supported by numerical analysis. The commercial finite element (FE) Forge2005 software was used in the present work to evaluate the forging process parameters and analyze the character of material deformation. The obtained numerical results are compared with the experimental analysis performed on the developed prototype press.