A global approach for the digitalization of progressive sheet metal forming

Abstract Digital twins are a major constituent of advanced and smart manufacturing, to decrease the time to market, improve process efficiency and reduce waste production. There seems to be a common understanding on the different levels of integration of the communication between the physical and digital objects, with the digital twin being the stage when the digital object sends actions in real time to perform to the physical object, for an efficient execution of the process. The aim of this study is to design a physical object of a progressive multistage sheet forming process, based on the digital shadow, and the digital twin, with automatic updates of critical process parameters such as blank-holder force and tool displacement. The physical object involves cutting of rectangular blanks, U-stretch drawing, springback and then a last bending stage to decrease the springback magnitude and reach a final reference shape. A nominal numerical model of the process highlights the different stages and the sensitivity of the outputs to the variations of the mechanical behavior. The global framework containing the instrumented physical object to obtain parts with steel and aluminum thin sheets, the design of experiments used to generate data and the metamodel developed from these outputs to operate the digital twin is presented. Finally, a numerical proof of concept is presented.