An Incremental Roll Forming Process for Manufacturing Doubly Curved Sheets from General Quadrilateral Sheet Blanks with Enhanced Process Features

In order to manufacture a doubly curved sheet metal effectively, a flexible incremental roll forming process has been developed by adopting the advantages of the incremental forming process and the roll forming process by combining inherent flexibility of the incremental forming process and continuous deformation of the roll forming process. In the proposed roll forming system, a newly designed gripper system is attached in order to achieve automation and more precision manufacturing of the required sheet intended double curvature. The forming method has been further enhanced to form general quadrilateral blanks (including a square, a rectangle, a symmetrical trapezoid and an asymmetrical trapezoid, etc.) into doubly curved shapes by controlling the forming schedule developed by various experiments.