Incremental forming of solid cylindrical components using flow forming principles

The flow forming process has been used to produce a range of engineering components, with reduced forming loads and enhanced mechanical and surface quality for a finished part, compared with press formed parts. However, studies on the flow forming of solid cylindrical components have not been documented. In this paper, test facilities were established in order to study the effects of roller geometry and feed rate on forming load and material flow when flow forming a simple solid cylindrical component with uniform diameter, using lead as the material. Experiments are carried out to study the effects of feed rates and roller geometry on material flow. A finite element (FE) model is proposed to simulate the process using ABAQUS implicit and explicit. The difficulties in simulating flow forming are outlined and the model using different formulations are compared for their efficiency in analysing the process.