Analysis of Material Behavior in Sheet Incremental Forming Operations.

New production technologies have been developed in these last few years as answers to new market needs such as high production flexibility, low volume batches, more complex shapes of the final pieces and new materials. In particular, for sheet forming the new developed technologies are flexible forming, sheet die-less forming and sheet fluid forming. In previous works the authors have already described the results obtained studying a new sheet forming process based on general purpose CNC machine (called sheet incremental forming on CNC machines) equipped with special tool. This kind of process can be used to produce prototypes of industrial components and also for low volume batches. The present paper reports the results of the analysis conducted on the produced pieces in terms of metallographic structure, hardness distribution and breaking conditions. These results are very interesting in order to understand the physical limits of the material when subjected to this peculiar deformation process. © 2004 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]