The influence of die design on HexaBend technology

A tendency towards a higher flexibility of production systems can be observed in production engineering that also holds true for bending technologies. One way to meet the increasing requirements is provided by HexaBend technology, a freeform bending technology. It was developed by the Fraunhofer. Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in cooperation with an industrial partner. The recent built testing bed can produce parts not only with arcs after arcs, but also with arcs in arcs with the forming process taking place between a fixed tool and a moveable die. The 6 degrees of freedom of the die guarantee a high high potential in flexibility allowing 3-dimensional parts to be produced in one step. Some form of guidance and the fixed tool, geometrical elements of the profile and the flexible die are essential beyond the machine drives. It is expected that there will be a wide range of influences particularly for the die so that an appropriate model is required for determining the parameters occurring. More-over its is also interesting to analyze the influence of the parameters on the bending process. The approach applied here for gaining experience is a combination of statistical methods and the finite-element method due to the great number of potential variations. The following shows an extract of the findings analyzed