System and Design of Five-Axis Water Jet Incremental Sheet Metal Forming Machine Tool

High pressure water jet flexible incremental sheet metal forming (HPWJFISMF), which is a new kind of sheet mental dieless forming with good flexibility, is quite suitable for the production of multi-varieties and small batch products and trial-manufacture of new products. We have designed a five-axis forming machine tool with three translational degrees of freedom of workbench and two rotational degrees of freedom of the nozzle .in order to study the technology of HPWJFISMF. This paper gives a detailed introduction for the hardware structure and software system of machine tool of HPWJFISMF, which adopts an open control system with PC and motion controller. The control system of HPWJFISMF is designed on the platform of VC++6.0 in object-oriented way. The working performance stability of the machine tool has been verified by machining experiments, which offers a good platform for the study of high pressure water jet forming.