Polymer incremental sheet forming process: temperature analysis using response surface methodology

Abstract

To reduce costs associated with the manufacturing of customized products, several innovative forming processes have been developed. Incremental sheet forming (ISF) is one of these new technologies, becoming, in the past decade, more interesting for the academic and industrial community. The influence of main process parameters, namely, tool diameter, spindle speed, feed rate, and step down, is studied in depth in this paper. The maximum temperature achieved during the forming process of a truncated pyramid frustum with a circular generatrix using three nonbiocompatible and two biocompatible polymer materials is measured. Box–Behnken design of experiments and the response surface methodology have been utilized to statistically analyze the results and to provide models able to predict the maximum temperatures