Basic Investigations in Incremental Profile Forming

Increasing demands in profile manufacturing lead to a constant increase of the geometric complexity of the profile. Especially in times where lightweight design and load adaption are of huge importance, a need for new profile manufacturing technologies exists. In order to cope with this development a new profile forming method was invented, the Incremental Profile Forming (IPF). IPF allows the flexible manufacturing of profiles with varying cross section geometries along the longitudinal profile axis and offers therefore high potential for the manufacturing of lightweight design parts. Due to the high degree of innovation research work regarding the process fundamentals as well as the process limits is necessary. For this reason, the results of the first basic experimental and numerical investigations are presented. While in the experiments the potential of the process is shown in feasibility studies, first analysis of the forming process as well as the influence of diverse process parameters on the process was carried out in numerical investigations. Finally first analytical approaches for predicting the forming behavior are presented.