LAUSR

Abstract Flexible sheet metal forming is important for many industrial sectors such as shipbuilding, chemical engineering and shell structure construction. For thin and small sheet metal, incremental forming can be used. But for thick and large sheet metal, it is not applicable. We present a new flexible sheet metal forming method of incremental bending based on minimum energy principle. In the presented method, sheet metal is formed by continuous bending operations. The minimum energy principle is used to calculate bending trajectory. In this paper multiple tools bending strategy is presented to improve forming efficiency. The presented method is tested in a customized prototype. A kind of variable curvature sheet metal has been formed. The experimental results show that the presented method is effective and efficient.