FLEXIBLE TOOLING INMETAL FORMING

BY

Raju Pegada

M.Tech, NITT.

Contents

• Introduction of metal forming

• Types of metal forming

• Flexible tooling in metal forming

• Process

• Difficulties in flexible metal forming

• Advantages of Flexible tooling

What is metal forming?

• Metal forming is the metal working process of fashioning metal parts and objects through mechanical deformation.

• The workpiece is reshaped without adding or removing material, and its mass remains unchanged.

• Forming operates on the materials science principle of plastic deformation, where the physical shape of a material is permanently deformed.

Types of metal forming

Compressive forming

•

forging rolling extrusion

Tensile Forming

Stretch forming

Expanding

Combined tensile and compressive forming

Deep drawing Wire Drawing

Shearing forming

shearing Conventional stamping Fine blanking

Bending forming

‘V’ Bending Edge Bending

Flexible tooling in metal forming

• To reduce the cost and time involved in making matching dies ,several flexible tool forming techniques make use of a male or a female die together with a flexible pad.

• When manufacturing different product shapes, dies can be easily interchanged without alignment or mismatch problems.

• The same flexible pad can be used for forming several different workpiece shapes.

• Flexible tool material such as polyurethane and rubber are being used in the design of metal forming tools.

conventional die forming flexible forming fluid die less forming

MULTI-POINT PRESS FORMING

Fixed multi-point press forming method Mobile multi-point press forming method

MULTI-POINT STRETCH FORMING

Fixed multi-point stretch forming method Mobile multi-point stretch forming method

Digitally flexible multi-point tooling manufacturing system

DIFFICULTIES

Forming error caused by ‘straight effect’ inflexible forming process

(the dotted circle shows undeformed straight part)

Numerical simulation results for flexible forming process

Advantages of Flexible tooling

• Reduced manufacturing cost

• Lower cost per unit produced

• Greater labour productivity

• Greater machine efficiency

• Improved quality

• Increased system reliability

• Reduced parts inventories

• Adaptability to CAD/CAM operations

• Shorter lead times

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