Incremental forming of hollow shapes

Hollow shapes, particularly the shafts of road vehicle power trains, are a major potential for technical innovation since these components have to be especially strong while component weight and unit costs are highly restrictive. This strategy for innovation requires focusing on a wide range of disciplines of product and technology development and demands intensive and advanced interdisciplinary development of the required production technology. Hollow shapes can be produced with the spin extrusion process. Spin extrusion is a flexible rotatory pressure forming process which can be applied in dimensional ranges that cannot be attained by comparable processes, not in a cost-effective fashion or for very expensive materials. Spin extrusion is an incremental technique, meaning there are also the known difficulties standing in the way of analytically describing processes and targeted process control. The energetic approach has proved to be the most practicable because it makes it possible to differentiate between a wide range of factors and parameters having an impact on the process while applying them to machine and process control. The results of process development was a new processing principle for manufacturing hollow shaft components by forming for specific needs of the automobile industry and other industries with major accuracy and safety requirements.