A sustainability point of view on sheet metal forming operations: material wasting and energy consumption in incremental forming and stamping processes

Abstract

Sustainability and sustainable production is nowadays a wide research field due the urgency of reducing environmental burdens of industrial production. Sustainable manufacturing issues are widely investigated too. In particular, due to the relevance such issues assume for automotive and aeronautical industry, the investigation of sheet metal forming processes sustainability is worth studying and, within this research fields, a certain lack of knowledge is still present. Many studies have been presented concerning the evaluation and reduction of environmental burdens in manufacturing. In this paper, the authors focus on sheet metal forming and aim to investigate both the efficient use of materials and process energy saving. The paper presents a sensitivity analysis which is based on experimental and numerical data. A traditional forming process (stamping) is numerically analyzed to determine process energy and also the amount of material utilized for the initial blank. An experimental campaign was instead developed on an incremental forming operation and energy measurements were obtained. Both the processes were carried out using two different aluminum alloys and two different sheet thickness values. Furthermore, two final component geometries were investigated for both of the processes. The analysis reached the conclusion that the investigated processes are quite different to each other as their environmental impact is concerned since both the required process energy and the possible material savings are rather different for the two operations. The obtained results allowed to formulate some comparison guidelines as sustainability of the investigated operations is concerned.