Investigation on Forming Precision of Flexible Rolling Process for Three-dimensional Surface Parts of Different Sheet Materials

Flexible rolling is a novel forming process for three-dimensional surface parts combining the rolling process with multi-point forming technology. By controlling the distribution of the gap between the upper and lower forming rolls in the rolling process, the sheet metal is thinned non-uniformly in thickness direction, and the longitudinal elongation is different along the transverse direction, which makes the sheet metal generate three-dimensional deformation. In this paper, the comparison of the forming precision with different sheet materials is presented by measuring the shape errors of the simulation results, the materials of sheet metal are low carbon steel 08Al sheet and aluminum alloy 2024-O sheet. Torus and saddle surface parts of different sheet materials are simulated and their experimental results are presented. The simulated results are consistent with the experimental results which verify the feasibility of the use of simulation to guide the experiment. The shape errors of simulated results show that the forming precision of the 08Al sheet is better than that of the 2024-O sheet, but all the deviations of the forming parts are less than 2.0 mm excluding the head and tail regions of the forming parts in rolling direction.