Experimental investigation into a new hybrid-forming process: Incremental stretch drawing

Incremental sheet metal forming is an evolving process, which is suitable for the production of limited quantities of sheet metal components. The main advantages of this process over conventional forming processes are reduced setup cost and manufacturing lead time, as it eliminates the need of special purpose dies, improves formability, reduces forming forces, and provides process flexibility. The objective of this work is to investigate a new hybrid-forming process, which intends to combine incremental sheet metal forming with deep drawing process and has been named as “incremental stretch drawing.” A number of setups and fixtures were developed to carry out experiments to achieve incremental stretch drawing and understand the mechanism of the process. This process addresses some of the challenges of incremental sheet metal forming, that is, limited formability in terms of forming depth, especially at steeper wall angles and subsequent thinning of sheet. It is observed that the proposed process is able to reduce thinning as much as about 300%, considering same forming depth for incremental sheet metal forming and incremental stretch drawing processes. Improvement in formability, in terms of forming depths, also has been observed to be near about 100% in particular cases.