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Heat-assisted incremental bending of metal plates with unsymmetrical curvatures

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Abstract

Small-batched metal plates with free-form surfaces are widely used in different manufacturing industries; however, it is unrealistic to produce such metal plates based on traditional die stamping and rolling processes. Over the last few decades, numerous efforts have been adopted to produce the metal plates with free-form surfaces with acceptable quality, efficiency, and cost through flexible forming processes. In the present paper, a heat-assisted incremental bending process was proposed to manufacture metal plates with large unsymmetrical curvatures. The test metal plates were supported by some hydraulic cylinders, and the punch moved up and down to press the metal plates according to the loading path determined by the minimum energy method. In addition, an induction heating system was applied to heat the metal plates at the punching position. One objective metal plate with large unsymmetrical curvature is deformed based on the heat-assisted incremental bending experiments. The obtained results indicate that the proposed thermo-mechanical flexible forming process could produce complex metal plates with good accuracy and high efficiency.

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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

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Funding

The research is supported by SIAT-CUHK Joint Laboratory of Precision Engineering, SIAT Innovation Program for Excellent Young Researchers (2019Y9G031), and Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2019A1515012035).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shien-Ming Wu School of Intelligent Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

    Bo Wei, Chenghui Zhou & Ruxu Du

  2. Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China

    Feifei Zhang & Kai He

  3. Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Precision Engineering, Shenzhen, China

    Feifei Zhang & Kai He

Authors
  1. Bo Wei
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  2. Feifei Zhang
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  3. Kai He
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  4. Chenghui Zhou
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  5. Ruxu Du
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Contributions

Bo Wei wrote the paper and carried out the experiments; Feifei Zhang helped with the framework of the paper and provided data analysis; Kai He provided the experimental condition; Chenghui Zhou helped with the experiments; Ruxu Du contributed to the main idea of combining heat and incremental bending.

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Correspondence to Feifei Zhang.

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Wei, B., Zhang, F., He, K. et al. Heat-assisted incremental bending of metal plates with unsymmetrical curvatures. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 114, 3437–3448 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-07067-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-07067-6

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