Processing of sheets made of long fibers reinforced plastics by SPIF

Abstract

Abstract. The flexibility of the Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) has been exploited in processing of sheets made by fiber reinforced polymers. Indeed, polymer-based sheets are always more employed in product planning, meeting the increasing demand of lightweight structures. However, considering the SPIF features, especially the need to totally clamp the formed sheet along its edges, processing of long-fiber reinforced sheets is critical owing to the brittleness of the fibers, whose length must be preserved. The SPIF dynamics of a customized process solution to be used for long fibers reinforced thermoplastics (LFRTPs) were already proposed and analyzed by FE simulations. Herein, the design of the equipment that allows the process to be executed was proposed detailing it in each part. In particular, the idea was based on assembling a working room that was designed to be able to control both: a) the desired process temperature maintaining it constant during the whole forming step looking at the glass and melting point of the polymeric matrix; b) a hydrostatic pressure on the bottom side of the sheet to guarantee its proper shaping. Moreover, numerical simulations were also executed to locally analyze the forming behavior of the sheet at changing of some specific properties.