Incremental Electromagnetic Forming

Especially in the field of conventional forming techniques such as deep drawing and stretch forming, high tooling costs and a strong dependency of tools on specific component geometries make it difficult to address these challenges. Even slight variations require significant cost and time investment for implementation. This particularly affects the manufacturing of large components. Therefore, there is a high demand for innovative manufacturing methods that meet these new requirements.

Electromagnetic forming (EMF) offers a solution to this problem. It utilizes the energy density of pulsed magnetic fields generated by the sudden discharge of electrical energy through a (tool) coil to induce Lorentz forces in electrically conductive workpieces, leading to forming. This contactless force application allows the same tooling coil to be flexibly used for manufacturing different geometry variants. Furthermore, it ensures very gentle surface processing. However, applications of EMF have so far been limited to small to medium-sized components or component areas.

This technological and economic process limitation can be overcome through incremental electromagnetic forming. In this approach, a small component area is first electromagnetically formed. Then, the tooling coil and workpiece are moved relative to each other, allowing a different, possibly adjacent, workpiece area to be formed. This way, even large components or component areas can be manufactured successively with a relatively small coil, making the known advantages of EMF over conventional methods available for large components as well.