A Novel Incremental Sheet Bending Process of Complex Curved Steel Plate

Bending complex curved steel plates for constructing ship hull has long been a challenge in shipbuilding industry. This paper presents a novel incremental bending process to obtain complicated curved steel plates by a series of sequential and layered punches. Taking advantage of this process, the blank plate that is fixed and held by a flexible supporting system can incrementally be bent into the target shape by a press tool along a planned tool path step by step and layer by layer. Acting as a “lower die,” the flexible supporting system can provide flexible and multifunctional supports for the work piece during the forming process, whose four general motion modes are demonstrated in this paper. Meanwhile, the procedures of tool path planning and forming layering are also explained in detail. In addition, aiming at different motion modes of the flexible supporting system, two springback compensation methods are given. Furthermore, according to the forming principle presented in this paper, an original incremental prototype equipment was designed and manufactured, which is mainly composed of a three-axis computer numerical control (CNC) machine, a flexible supporting system, and a three-dimensional (3D) scanning feedback system. A series of forming experiments focusing on a gradual curvature shape were carried out using this prototype to investigate the feasibility and validity of this forming process.