A Comparative Study on Process Potentials for Frictional Stir- and Electric Hot-assisted Incremental Sheet Forming

Abstract Incremental sheet forming (ISF), as an advanced forming technique, has received increasing interest from both academia and industry due to its improved formability, greater process flexibility and reduced energy consumption in its life cycle. However, with the growing application of lightweight alloys with very limited material elongation, conventional ISF inevitably encounters challenges in processing these alloys at room temperature, especially in forming magnesium and titanium alloys. Therefore, heat-assisted ISF techniques have been proposed to further enhance material formability at elevated temperatures. In this work, two heat-assisted ISF approaches, frictional stir- and electric hot- assisted ISF, have been employed to process the hard-to-form materials in terms of the flexibility and local dynamic heating. The temperature evolution and corresponding forming force at different feed rates of these two techniques, is investigated in detail to build up a processing window. In addition, process capabilities are compared by forming different geometrical shapes of magnesium alloy AZ31B of 1.4 mm sheet thickness. The investigation results show the pros and cons of frictional stir- and electric hot- assisted ISF. Frictional stir-assisted ISF is more efficient than electric hot-assisted ISF under current experimental results. However, electric hot-assisted ISF has faster heating rate which makes this technique less dependent on the component geometry.