Preform design of hybrid-forming process to make sheet metal IT products with a sharp edge

Existing forging processes have limitations in forming products with sharp edges. Therefore, a new hybrid-forming process that combines drawing and forging processes was designed to form a sharp-edged product. First, a corner radius of a preform design was arranged to be smaller than the minimum bent area corner radius formed in general drawing processes. Then, the shape of the preform was planned to have the exact shape of the final product. Given that forming loads are a limiting condition in forging processes, they were set as an evaluation criterion to determine design requirements for final product shapes and the shapes of preforms. The reliability of finite element analysis results was verified by comparing analysis and experiment results, and a multistage preforming process was implemented to satisfy the determined evaluation criterion. This study demonstrates that IT products with sharp edges can be formed.