Sensitivity Analysis for Numerical Sheet Metal Forming Processes

Abstract

Sheet Metal Forming is a widely used process in industry. However, it is also an expensive onedue to the diversity and complexity of methodologies used to obtain the adequate tools combination.In fact, even though there is already finite element based software to compute the final shape of aformed sheet from a given tool, there is no efficient procedure to predict the inverse problem: the toolgeometry from the formed component final shape.The final aim of this work is to improve the current trial-and-error process for the inverse problem.To achieve this objective, an integrated approach for tools geometry manipulation is presented, basedon the parametric NURBS description of the tools surface. This is applied to perform a sensitivityanalysis in order to evaluate the effect of numerical noise and small disturbances on the tools designvariables in the final formed sheet. Furthermore, the robustness of the proposed approach is evaluatedusing two parts with distinct complexity.