Shaping of Sharp-Edged Design Elements by Electromagnetic Forming

Modern car body design includes parts with sharp-edged elements, which are challenging for conventional sheet metal forming technologies. This is especially critical when implementing aluminum parts in order to consider lightweight design requirements. Applying high strain rates allows increasing formability for numerous materials, including typical aluminum alloys used in the automotive industry. Therefore, integrating high-speed forming into a conventional process can help to extend forming limits. The feasibility of locally sharpening a deep-drawn radius by integrated electromagnetic forming was proved in the literature, but up to now, the investigated target radii were much larger compared to the sheet thickness. The presented paper shows that target radii in and below the size of the sheet thickness are possible by this process combination. Based on a simplified 2D component geometry, complementary experimental and numerical investigations served for developing different variants of a modular test tool and analyzing the influence of important process and tool parameters on the forming result.