BRIEF PAPER: JUDICIOUS HYBRIDIZATION OF INCREMENTAL FORMING AND ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TO ENHANCE PRODUCT COMPLEXITY THROUGH NON-PLANAR SUBSTRATE/DEPOSITION

Hybrid manufacturing is the combination of two or more different processes to overcome their individual limitations and take advantage of their combined strengths to produce components more efficiently and eco-friendly than existing processes. Double-sided incremental forming (DSIF) and metal additive manufacturing (MAM) using direct energy deposition are the most flexible processes that do not require geometry-specific tooling to produce customized and complex metal parts. However, there is no absolute geometrical freedom, and each process and machine has certain limitations (MAM process has gravity and torch accessibility constraints due to lower surface inclinations and intricate shapes, respectively). Hence, the main objective of the present work is to demonstrate the feasibility thereof from the judicious hybridization of DSIF and MAM processes ( termed as HyDAM, Hybrid Deformation aided Additive Manufacturing) in terms of product complexity by exploiting the geometrical freedom offered from both processes. Non-planar substrates are formed using DSIF and deposition is carried out using wire-based direct energy deposition (W-DED). In the present work, two complex geometries which are difficult to fabricate by conventional AM process due to torch accessibility and gravity constraints are considered to demonstrate their feasibility through proposed hybrid process. An appropriate build orientation of the component is chosen, and the corresponding substrate is formed using DSIF. The material deposited on the formed substrate with a suitable deposition path. The feasibility of proposed HyDAM is successfully demonstrated by fabricating complex components using a three-axis machine during deposition. Future work includes the automatic feature recognition for HyDAM, role of process parameters on bead asymmetry, path planning, exploring complex geometries (for example: deposition of non-planar cellular/perforated structures), performing thermo-mechanical analysis, and achieving the good accuracy.