Smoothing Parametric Design of Addendum Surfaces for Sheet Metal Forming

Abstract The manual design of addendum surfaces on common CAD platforms is very tedious which requires many trials-corrections, which will certainly affect the construction efficiency and quality of addendum surfaces, and then affect the formability and quality of the workpiece in the process of sheet forming. In this paper, an automatic procedure based on parametric design method is proposed for the rapid construction of the addendum surfaces. The kernel of the parametric method is constructing boundary curves based on the shape of surfaces of workpiece and designing guide curves based on Hermite curve interpolation. By some simple parameters, the shape of the addendum surfaces could be controlled and adjusted easily. In addition, a minimum energy optimization method is employed to further optimize the constructed addendum surface. A finite element analysis for the sheet forming process is performed to evaluate the forming quality of constructed addendum surfaces. The instance illustrates that the addendum surface constructed by the proposed method could ensure both the overall smoothing of surfaces and the final forming quality, and it has a good effect on springback after forming. This research proposes a smoothing parametric design method for addendum surfaces construction which could construct and optimize addendum surfaces rapidly.