Suppression of necking in incremental sheet forming

Incremental sheet forming enables sheet metal to deform above a conventional strain-based forming limit. The mechanics reason has not been clearly explained yet. In this work, the stress-based forming limit was utilized for through-thickness necking analysis to explain this uncovered question. Stress-based forming limit which has path-independency shows that the stress states in top, middle and bottom surfaces did not exceed the forming limit curve at the same time and each layer has different stress state in terms of their deformation history to suppress necking. It has been found that it is important to consider the gradient stress profile following the deformation history for the proper forming limit analysis of incremental sheet forming. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.