On the Origin of Specimen: Load-adapted Integral Sheet Metal Products

Flexible flow splitting is a novel forming process allowing the production of a new class of semi-finished goods: nonlinear branched sheet metal parts. This advancement of the linear flow splitting process combines both, the benefits of flexibility in cross-section shape and the flexibility of the part's curvature progression in feed direction and discloses new potentials in lightweight designed sheet metal formed parts. The paper presents the implementation of this new manufacturing process, the challenges of processing bifurcated and curved band edge sheet metal parts and a strategy to enhance the part accuracy by a closed loop controlled tooling system.