Study on Flexible Bending Process of Sheet Metal and Its Production Equipment

Abstract

In order to solve the problem that it was difficult to ensure the bending quality of sheet metal in the actual production process by using traditional bending tooling, a flexible sheet metal bending process and its production equipment were studied on the premise of analyzing the influencing factors of the sheet metal bending process. Structural flexibility design technology was adopted in this equipment. For different product bending sizes, only the bending punch inserts needed to be replaced. Flexible servo control design was adopted to control the bending process. The bending process parameters were accurately conformed according to the real-time measurement about the part thickness The coordinated motion control strategy about blank holder servo motor and bending servo motor was adopted to achieve the required bending size of the products. Closed-loop control technology was used to ensure that the bending angle of finished products was 100% qualified by means of the bending angle closed-loop real-time correction based on on-line real-time detection. The simulation results of a same sheet metal bending product by using traditional tooling and flexible equipment showed that the bending process and its production equipment which were studied in this paper were obviously superior to the traditional tooling method in bending quality. Keywords—sheet metal bending; flexibility; closed-loop control