Single point incremental forming of PVC

Polymers represent an important percentage of the raw materials currently utilized in manufacturing applications but their conventional processing techniques are mainly suitable for mass production. Growing requirements of low volume, high quality, customized products are triggering the need for developing innovative flexible polymer processing techniques that are capable of dealing with the new agile manufacturing trends involving very short life cycles and very short development and production lead times. This paper is concerned with these issues and is focused on the possibility of employing the single point incremental forming technology currently being developed for flexible sheet metal forming applications, for producing low cost, small-batch, high-quality polymeric sheet components. Experimentation is based on the utilization of an ordinary CNC milling machine and a single point forming tool to shape commercial PVC sheets and the overall investigation is centred on the characterization and evaluation of the formability limits of the process as a function of the major operating parameters. Results show that single point incremental forming of commercial PVC sheets at room temperature seems promising for the manufacture of complex polymer sheet components with very high depths.