A comprehensive blank development method for forming sheet metal parts

For some shortcomings in the use of standard radial length development in the blank development for forming sheet metal parts, an improved radial length normal spreading approach considering outside normal direction is developed to resolve blank development in sheet metal forming. Moreover, a comprehensive spreading method, which combines radial length normal spreading and orthogonal length development method, is presented in this paper to avoid the overlapping problem which happens sometime in the spreading process related to severely curved sheet parts. To deal with holes and gaps which exist in some sheet metal parts, dummy elements are used to calculate the intercepting line's length precisely. Finally, a multistep spreading and merging strategy is adopted to handle some special sheet metal parts with vertical free edges that should be jointed or not. Through practical applications, the effectiveness and the usefulness of this approach are evaluated, and the unfolded result is more reasonable; meanwhile, the obtained blank shape should be a better initial guess in the application of the so-called one-step quick analysis for sheet metal forming simulation.