Experimental and numerical investigation of a short, thin-walled steel tube incremental forming process

This paper concerns the forming of a short, thin-walled steel tube by means of an innovative incremental forming process close to spinning. Material characterization necessary for model calibration was carried out through tensile tests at different angles with respect to the rolling direction and simple shear tests. These data were used to identify material parameters of suitable behavior law taking into account the Baushinger effect but neglecting anisotropy. Thus, two different models were built in order to virtually reproduce the forming process. The obtained results are compared amongst themselves but also with experimental data coming from an industrial partner. It has been highlighted that the multidimensional model gives a good representation of the forming process both in terms of part geometry and applied load on tooling. The two-dimensional model is advantageous to predict qualitatively only part geometry with short CPU time. Special attention is paid to springback that occurs as a function of the studied part geometry.