Recent Developments and Trends in Flexible Forming Technology

Abstract

Flexible metal forming processes are novel ways to meet the growing needs for maintaining economic feasibility in mass production and customization. The flexible forming processes inherently have more process parameters to control than conventional processes, and thus they may be less economical. However, owing to the rapid development of computing technology over the last two decades, the numerical simulation approach has gained significant attention for optimizing the process parameters. Based on the numerical analysis, sophisticated theories have also been developed to describe the material deformation characteristics during forming processes. In this paper, incremental sheet metal forming, incremental bulk forming, and flexible roll forming are briefly overviewed with regard to innovative techniques for numerical simulations of various flexible metal forming processes.