Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Forming Force of Ti-6Al-4V Sheet in Electric Hot Incremental Forming Process of a conical part

In this paper, the performance of electric hot incremental forming process is investigated on the Ti-6Al-4V sheet by FE simulation and experimental method. Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloy sheet has extensively used in aerospace industries. Therefore, forming of this lightweight alloy is very important. Ti-6AI-4V sheet has poor formability at the room temperature and can be well-formed in high temperature. In this paper, the geometrical shape of final part was a cone frustum that obtained from forming of rectangular sheet, and the effect of processing parameters, such as wall angle, step size and tool diameter, on the forming forces were investigated. The results demonstrated that the forming force are increased by increasing of step size and decreasing of tool diameter. Also, to form parts with larger wall angle, the required force is lower. The process was simulated in the ABAQUS software to investigate the process using finite element analysis. The modeling was performed using local heat on the sheet. It showed a good agreement between the experimental and numerical results of forming force and deference between both of them is about 5.7%.