Forming Process of Automotive Body Panel based on Incremental Forming Technology

Development of new vehicle model is a long-time and high-cost procedure traditionally. In this paper, the typical automotive body panel has been formed by means of Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) technology which is high-flexibility, short-cycle, low-cost and so on. Based on the stereolithography (STL) triangle meshes, the SPIF main direction of the automotive body panel has been determined. In accordance with the partial fracture on the panel concave surface, the forming principles on single-stage and double-stage have been analysized. Multi-stage forming has been applied to realize the automotive panel processing successfully. To ensure the SPIF efficiency and quality, the first-stage forming process has been to finish the preliminary integral forming for the parts according to the concave intermediate shape, and then to conduct the second-stage forming for the concave final shape locally. The experimental data has showed that the reasonable forming stage can effectively optimize the thickness distribution of the parts. It is helpful to new vehicle development based on the SPIF flexible manufacturing technology in the future.