A Novel Method for Laser Forming of Two-Step Bending of a Dome Shaped Part

In recent decades, one of the challenges in sheet metal forming was production of twostepbending surfaces without mechanical tools and external force or by a combination of heatsource and mechanical tools. Forming with a heat source such as laser beam has the potential offorming arbitrary 3D shapes such as two-step bending surfaces. In this paper, a novel method forlaser forming of complicated two-step bending dome shaped part is proposed. The initial sheets aremade from mild steel with thickness of 0.85 mm. In this method, combination of simple straightlines leads to production of a two-step bending dome shaped part. The obtained results show thatthe proposed method is a powerful irradiating scheme for production of two-step bending domeshapes with considerable deformations and symmetries. In addition, using an analytical study, themechanics of plate deformation is precisely investigated. All of the investigations are performedexperimentally and numerically and it is shown that numerical results are in a good agreementwith the experimental observations.

Keywords:

Laser forming , Two-step bending , Dome shaped part