Exploring the Possibilities of Sheet Metal Forming Via Plastic-Based Additive Manufacturing Moulding

Abstract: Additive Manufacturing (AM) has freeform fabrication capabilities of complex geometries directly from feedstock material. This can potentially enhance the efficient use of material and the cost effectiveness. It also offers design flexibility, and it is versatile. However, there are challenges discouraging the various industries (such as the automotive sector) from adopting AM techniques, when considering suitability of AM components for specific applications. These barriers include the high cost of AM components due to low production speed, post processing requirements, and high initialcost. After cost, there is inferior quality performance compared to conventional fabrications, and inability of direct creation of many typical components such as those made by sheet metal forming. Rather than the use of AM as a tool for the final product, the thesis aims to develop cost- effectiveand sustainable plastic dies as a mid-chain tool via AM. Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is selected to fabricate the plastic dies at a reasonable cost. A laboratory experiment along with Finite Element Analyses (FEA) were conducted to compare metal and plastic dies for sheet metal V-bending. Furthermore, the influence of the process variables namely sheet metal thickness, punch radius,die radius, die width and the ratio of die width to sheet metal thickness on springback have been analyzed using Design of Experiments (DOE).The reliability of the proposed plastic and metal dies was investigated using FEA and experimental work. A proof of concept (POC), conclusions and recommendation discuss the feasibility of using plastic dies for sheet metal bending.