Incremental Sheet Forming of a Composite Made of Thermoplastic Matrix and Glass-Fiber Reinforcement

Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) has been widely investigated in the last twenty years, highlighting advantages as low-cost, higher formability and greater process flexibility if compared to traditional processes. Recent works have proven the ISF feasibility for polymer processing whereas limited investigations exist on composite materials. In the proposed study, an experimental research was carried out with the aim to investigate the influence of process factors on the workability of composite parts. The attention was focused on extruded Reinforced Polyamide-6 sheets. The material is made of thermoplastic matrix and 15% of glass fibers as reinforcement. The processed material is characterized by a glass temperature higher than 50°C and, therefore, ISF was performed with the addition of an external heating source. More in detail, the experiments were carried out on a three axis CNC milling machine equipped with an additional chamber designed for the material heating. In this paper, the influence of the main process factors (i.e. wall slope angle, step depth and process temperature) on the manufactured parts and on the process feasibility was investigated.