Abstract
In order to make a doubly-curved sheet metal effectively, a sheet metal forming process has been developed by adopting the flexibility of the incremental forming process and the principle of bending deformation which causes slight deformation in thickness. The developed process is an unconstrained forming process with no holder. For this study, the experimental equipment is set up with the roll set which consists of two pairs of support rolls and one center roll. In the experiments using aluminum sheets, it is found that the curvature of the formed sheet metal is determined by controlling the distance between supporting rolls in pairs and the forming depth of the center roll and it also depends on the thickness of the sheet metal. In order to check the effect of process parameters on the generation of sheet metal curvatures in this process, the orthogonal array is adopted. From the experimental results, among the process parameters, the distance between supporting rolls in pairs along the direction of one principal radius of curvature as well as the forming depth and the thickness of the material is shown to influence the generation of curvature in the same direction significantly. That is, the other distance between supporting rolls in pairs which are not located in the same direction of one principal radius of curvature, does not have an significant effect on the generation of the curvature in that direction. It mainly affects the generation of curvature in its own direction with the forming depth and the thickness of the material.
