Tooling concepts to speed up incremental sheet forming

A major drawback of asymmetric incremental sheet forming (AISF) is the long cycle time. AISF is known in general as forming of a sheet metal by only one small forming zone. The developed concepts presented in this paper aim at decreasing the main process time by applying several forming zones on the part through multiple tools working in parallel. By the use of a systematic design process, four major structural tooling concepts were invented. Those variants were compared to each other by a cost-utility analysis. As a result, a prototype with two tools was produced to fasten the AISF process.