Journal of Cleaner Production 29-30 (2012) 255e268

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

A sustainability point of view on sheet metal forming operations: material wasting and energy consumption in incremental forming and stamping processes
Giuseppe Ingarao a, *, Giuseppina Ambrogio b, Francesco Gagliardi b, Rosa Di Lorenzo a
a b

Dep. of Chemical, Managerial, Information and Mechanical Engineering, University of Palermo, 90128 Palermo, Italy Dep. of Mechanical Engineering, University of Calabria, 87036 Rende (CS), Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 15 June 2011 Received in revised form 13 January 2012 Accepted 13 January 2012 Available online 25 January 2012 Keywords: Sustainability evaluation Sheet metal forming Energy consumption Material wasting

a b s t r a c t
Sustainability and sustainable production is nowadays a wide research eld due the urgency of reducing environmental burdens of industrial production. Sustainable manufacturing issues are widely investigated too. In particular, due to the relevance such issues assume for automotive and aeronautical industry, the investigation of sheet metal forming processes sustainability is worth studying and, within this research elds, a certain lack of knowledge is still present. Many studies have been presented concerning the evaluation and reduction of environmental burdens in manufacturing. In this paper, the authors focus on sheet metal forming and aim to investigate both the efcient use of materials and process energy saving. The paper presents a sensitivity analysis which is based on experimental and numerical data. A traditional forming process (stamping) is numerically analyzed to determine process energy and also the amount of material utilized for the initial blank. An experimental campaign was instead developed on an incremental forming operation and energy measurements were obtained. Both the processes were carried out using two different aluminum alloys and two different sheet thickness values. Furthermore, two nal component geometries were investigated for both of the processes. The analysis reached the conclusion that the investigated processes are quite different to each other as their environmental impact is concerned since both the required process energy and the possible material savings are rather different for the two operations. The obtained results allowed to formulate some comparison guidelines as sustainability of the investigated operations is concerned. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction In the latest decades, materials and energy industrial consumption has undergone a growth which may exceed the limits of Earth resources. Jegatheesan et al. (Jegatheesan et al., 2009) underline the timing of resource depletion issue and afrm that coordinated efforts by various organizations are essential to quantify reserves and demands in order to enable the development and implementation of strategies for sustainable recovery, usage, and recycling of natural resources. The implementation of ecological thinking in the total life cycle of a products is often supported by a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Actually, it is possible to quantify and analyze the environmental impact of each phase of a product life cycle as ISO 14040 and 14044 standards also assess (ISO 14040, 2006; ISO 14044, 2006).

* Corresponding author. Fax: 39 (0) 917099973. E-mail address: giuseppe.ingarao@unipa.it (G. Ingarao). 0959-6526/$ e see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.01.012

Industry account approximately one-third of global nal energy use and almost 40% of the total energy-related CO2 emissions. In the last three decades, the industrial energy efciency has improved and CO2 intensity has declined substantially in many sectors, in other words, industrial energy intensity (energy use per unit of industrial output) has declined substantially over the last three decades across all manufacturing sub-sectors. However, this progress has been overcome by growing worldwide industrial production. As a consequence, total industrial consumption and CO2 emissions have continued to rise. Most industrial energy use is for raw materials production: for instance, iron and steel processing is responsible for the 30% of industrial CO2 emissions, while the 32% of the total industrial carbon emission arise from production and processing of metallic materials such as iron, steels and aluminum (IEA, 2009). In industrial sector CO2 emissions derives both from direct emissions and indirect emissions, the latter are due to the industrial use of electricity (the electricity the industries use for their productions) and currently represent the 32% of total amount. Reducing CO2 from industrial sector has to be an essential part of

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a global action to prevent irreversible impact of climate changes. Therefore, material and energy efciency strategies implemented on global scale are the best short-term method to strongly reduce the CO2 emissions. The study of products and associated materials life cycles involves assessing the environmental impacts associated with the full life of products themselves, from the raw materials extraction to their return to the ecosphere as waste. An amount of energy is necessary to extract and rene to give materials, then, of course, energy and resources are also necessary to manufacture the materials into products. Moreover, an amount of energy and resource consumption is often associated to the use phase of a process (for instance cars and household electrical appliances). Finally, energy consumption has to be taken into account also in the disposal phase of a product. Moreover, also emissions of Green House Gases (GHG) have to be considered, mainly due to the relation between electricity application and burning fossil fuel. Within this scenario, it was assessed that an energy efcient manufacturing approach is a necessary strategy (Allwood et al., 2011). 1.1. Manufacturing issues Sustainable manufacturing is an urgent and remarkable issue and the main concerns are related to more efcient use of materials and energy: sustainability assessment for manufacturing has to include the evaluation of environmental impacts of materials production and processing. Also topics related to energy consumption are rapidly becoming critical: actually, energy consumption impacts can be ameliorated to some extent by the ongoing pursuit of efciencies within existing processes, but demand is anticipated to double in the next 40 years (Allwood et al., 2011). Such increase imposes to lessen the total impacts of material production and processing (Gutowski, 2009; Gutowski et al., 2006). The requirements for manufacturing practices taking into account environmental sustainability are nowadays urgent, and different approaches are adopted in various countries (Kaebernick et al., 2003; Kaebernick and Kara, 2006). Many researchers have established some milestones on the crucial aspects of competitive sustainable manufacturing. They assessed that manufacturing processes must be designed and developed with the aim to reduce, eliminate or recycle wastes, to avoid chemical substances or physical agents and conditions that present hazards to human health or the environment. They suggested to design process with the goal to conserve energy and materials or to use most appropriate forms of energy and materials (Jovane et al., 2008; Veleva et al., 2001). All the above considerations prove that monitoring quantifying and minimizing the environmental impact of a manufacturing process is an urgent issue. In fact, in the latest years some researcher focused their studies on analyzing and modeling energy consumption and, generally speaking, the environmental burdens of some manufacturing processes. This is particularly true if the results obtained for machining are taken into account. Actually, many papers in this eld emphasize the possibility to precisely model machining processes sustainability factors. Some authors (Pusavec et al., 2010) propose a technology evaluation to understand the likely impacts of the use of technology on sustainability performance measures. Another study (Vijayaraghavan and Dornfeld, 2010) is focused on the energy consumption of metalworking and machining-based manufacturing systems and aims to the development of tools to automate the monitoring and analysis of machine tool energy consumption in complex manufacturing systems.

Gutowsky, (Gutowski et al., 2006; Gutowski, 2009) proposes a model able to calculate the electricity requirements for a manufacturing process as a function of the process and of the rate of the material processing. It is worth pointing out that in this approach both process parameter such as processing rate, work piece hardness and specics cutting mechanics can be considered in the model. Another effective model was developed by Narita and other authors (Narita et al., 2006). In particular, in that work the proposed procedure enables to calculate the environmental burdens (in terms of CO2 emissions) due to the electric consumption of machine tool component, cutting tools status, lubricant oil component and metal chips quantity. The addressed procedure provides accurate information on environmental burden of the machining process by considering some activities related to machine tool operation. An important recent contribution on energy consumption characterization for machining processes was developed by Diaz and other authors (Diaz et al., 2011). In this paper, some process parameter were varied in order to evaluate the inuence on energy consumption during a machining operation. Avram et al. (Avram and Xirouchakis, 2011) propose a research on the energy requirement at machine tool level in machining processes. This paper offers an energy consumption reduction perspective by considering alternative machining strategies and system components interactions translated into variable and constant power ows with respect to various use phase regimes of a machine tool system. An interesting research was developed also by Rajemi et al. (Rajemi et al., 2010): the aim of their work was to develop a new model and methodology for optimizing the energy footprint for a machined product. The total energy of machining a component by the turning process was modeled and optimized to derive an economic tool-life that satises the minimum energy footprint requirement. The paper clearly identies critical parameters in minimizing energy use. As far as the machining processes are regarded, a contribution on the minimization of lubricant amount strategies was developed in (Domnita, 2009). Some others contributions are related to quantication of environmental burdens of innovative manufacturing processes in order to compare them with conventional processes. Zhao et al. (Zhao et al., 2010) apply an LCA approach to analyze, from an environmental point of view a laser shock peeling and a laser assisted turning. Serres et al. (Serres et al., 2011) compare an innovative laser technology (CLAD) with a conventional machining process by applying an LCA approach: both material and energy consumptions are quantied and compared. Another comparison research was presented by Morrow et al. (Morrow et al., 2007). The article investigates three case studies to reveal the extent to which DMD-based manufacturing of molds and dies can currently achieve reduced environmental emissions and energy consumption relative to conventional manufacturing pathways. This research effort has produced a quantitative estimation of the energy consumption and emissions associated with the production of mold and die tooling via laser-based Direct Metal Deposition (DMD) and CNC milling. The above literature analysis provides evidences on how the proper choice of process parameters can improve or decrease the environmental burdens of a process; however, a good forecasting model is necessary to have such burdens for a given manufacturing process. On the other hand, in the metal forming research eld there is still a lack of knowledge in this sense mainly due to the need of a proper modeling of sustainability issues and factors to be taken into account. Metal forming processes have indeed a great relevance within industrial production thus their environmental analysis is crucial. Up to now the aforementioned studies focused on chipping processes, dealing with the inuence of material removal and cutting uids in parallel with the electricity

G. Ingarao et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 29-30 (2012) 255e268 Table 1 SPIF experimental tests. Test 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Shape Cone Cone Pyramid Pyramid Cone Cone Pyramid Pyramid Material AA-1050 AA-1050 AA-1050 AA-1050 AA-5754 AA-5754 AA-5754 AA-5754 Base dimension (mm) Thickness (mm) 1 1.5 1 1.5 1 1.5 1 1.5 Height (mm) 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 Angle ( ) 45 45 45 45 45 45 45 45

257

1.2. Forming perspective All the aforementioned approaches and contributions still leave a lack of knowledge in forming processes sustainability modeling. Actually, the models proposed in the technical literature investigate the processes taking machine tool level analysis results for granted. In other words, the outputs are not related to the input parameters by a model but simply hypothesized as measurable. On the contrary, a deep analysis of the cause-effect linkages (between process and material parameters and energy consumption, for instance) within each process would be necessary to properly model environmental impacts and hopefully to forecast the proper energy minimization strategy. In fact, if the dependence between process mechanics and energy requirement is not clear, it is not possible to select the most suitable environmental manufacturing strategy. A former approach related to a whole comprehension of energy requirement at process level for a forming process was recently developed by some researchers (Santos et al., 2011). These authors consider a bending process with the aim to describe process energy consumption. The authors analyze the eco design of a commercial press-brake outlining an energy evaluation for the bending process in terms of technology, machine capacity and usage mode. This study is the rst effort to reduce the gap with the machining process. In fact the authors divide the energy consumption in constant consumption contribution (corresponding mostly to the consumption during standby use mode) and variable consumption contribution (corresponding to the effective bending action). Moreover, they propose a model of energy calculation which considers the whole bending cycle of a machine tool. One step ahead in environmental analysis of the air bending processes was developed in a recent paper (Kellens et al., 2011) whose authors conclude that for bending operations the standby mode is responsible for a large amount of the total energy consumption and the increase of the bending speed leads to a reduction of the required energy per bend as result of the lower operation time. Another important aspect is related to the fact that some of the new developed sheet metal forming technologies are often energy intensive. This trend mainly derives from the necessity to deform light weight materials (Ingarao et al., 2011b). Such materials have

Lmax 120 Lmax 120 4max 120 4max 120 Lmax 120 Lmax 120

4max 120 4max 120

consumption. In the case of chipless-shaping processes with no signicant material waste or consumable usage such as forming, the saving on the electrical consumption of the machine tool becomes the dominant factor to analyze. Moreover, discrete manufacturing processes are responsible for a substantial part of the environmental impact of products, but are still poorly documented in terms of environmental footprint (Duou et al., 2010). Nevertheless, some former efforts dealing with environmental aspect of discrete part manufacturing are appearing. Jeswiet and Kara (Jeswiet and Kara, 2008) propose a method to calculate GHG emissions for a given manufacturing operation. The proposed model allows to quantify the emissions and it is applied both for forming and for machining operations. An improved modeling also including non-energy factors was also proposed (Nava et al., 2010) considering lubrication and enlarging the domain of investigation of a sustainability analysis in forming processes. A further development regarding sustainability issues in metal forming processes is given by Rahimifard and his coworkers (Rahimifard et al., 2010). These authors developed a comprehensive model taking into account direct energy required for a casting process (process energy and auxiliary energy required by supporting activities), and also indirect one related to overheads such as lighting or heating. The authors essentially show that a holistic approach is needed to represent sustainability of a manufacturing process. They proposed a model able to reach a measurement of energy impact of a casting process.

Fig. 1. Sketch of the SPIF equipment.

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Table 2 SPIF process parameters along the experimental campaign. Punch Diameter (mm) 15 Punch depth step (mm) 1 Punch feed (mm/min) 2000 Punch speed (r.p.m.) 200

Fig. 2. The acquired force components.

both lower formability and higher strength with respect to traditional stamping steels. In order to deform these materials, new technologies has to be developed able to overcome their resistance. Temperature based sheet metal forming, or dieless forming (Ingarao et al., 2011a) are just some examples; such new technologies require higher energy with respect traditional stamping processes. A former qualitative study on the impact of an innovative technology is reported in (Abu-Farha and Khraisheh, 2008). This paper deals with sustainability aspects of forming lightweight materials by using the superplastic forming technique, emphasizing the long-term potentials in reducing the adverse impact of the transportation industry on the environment with regard to the various elements of the comprehensive 6R approach (whose framework implies six possible leverages toward more sustainable

products to apply throughout their life cycle: to Recover, to Reuse, to Recycle, to Redesign, to Reduce, and to Remanufacture). In general, if sustainability evaluation has to be investigated for manufacturing process the general issue is both to nd out new processes (more environment-friendly than the existing ones) and to develop proper quantitative models able to demonstrate eventual environmental improvements. Actually, a new forming technology has to prove its improvement from a sustainability point of view in particular if it is based on an energy intensive process. Required energy, gases emissions, material wasting, lubricants use (and consequent waste), involved tooling manufacturing processes (and their relative environmental effects), production cost reduction, applicability in massive production for industrial applications are just some of the factors which should be taken into account to evaluate the actual environmental advantages of a given forming process. In this way, in this paper such considerations were developed for Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) processes. ISF was presented by Matsubara (Matsubara, 1994), for the rst time, in Japan, in the last 1990s and was designed with the aim to reduce necessary equipment and to increase production exibility; nowadays, the dieless conguration offered by ISF is driving it to an industrial standard. In the simplest conguration (Single Point Incremental Forming, SPIF), the process scheme present a sheet clamping equipment and a hemispherical punch that incrementally forms the sheet toward a desired geometry by a proper trajectory on the sheet itself. Such incremental action allows the manufacturing of complex products avoiding the use of rigid and dedicated clamping system, therefore process costs and times are reduced. These advantages took the researches studying ISF to the conclusion that this technology is a suitable alternative to traditional stamping when small lots of high differentiated products have to be manufactured. For instance, Jeswiet and Hagan analyzed the ISF suitability as prototyping tool to manufacture single piece of automotive part (Jeswiet and Hagan, 2001). Ambrogio et al. (Ambrogio et al., 2005) designed a reverse engineering procedure for the manufacture of a customized ankle support.

Fig. 3. The force trends for the conical shape.

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259

Fig. 4. The force trends for the pyramidal shape.

ISF process also allows high formability which was widely demonstrated: ISF process allows reaching higher strains level with respect to conventional stamping operations, as stated in 2002 by Filice et al. (Filice et al., 2002) and Kim and Park (Kim and Park, 2002). More recently, many researchers highlighted the ISF suitability for lightweight material processing: in 2008, Ambrogio et al. (Ambrogio et al., 2008) investigated a warm incremental forming of magnesium alloy AZ31B proving that a dramatic formability enhancement is possible by working magnesium in warm conditions, and that maximum formability occurs at 250  C. Other authors (Fan et al., 2010), instead, investigated the hot incremental forming of titanium alloys by using an electrical heating. On the other hand, the low geometrical accuracy and the process slowness are probably

600
500 400 Spire start

1500 1300 1100 900 700 500 300 100 -100 -300 -500

Spire start

Spire end

Force [N]

Fx [N]

Fz [N]

Spire end

spire lenght [mm]

Fig. 6. Forces components vs. spire length (zoom for a single spire) for test 7.

300
Force [N]
200 100 0

Fx [N] Fz [N]

Table 3 Energy components. Test 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Shape Cone Cone Pyramid Pyramid Cone Cone Pyramid Pyramid Material AA-1050 AA-1050 AA-1050 AA-1050 AA-5754 AA-5754 AA-5754 AA-5754 Thickness (mm) 1 1.5 1 1.5 1 1.5 1 1.5 (Ex Ey) (J) 760.99 1459.3 1237.17 1742 2018.03 3635 2917.93 4150 Ez (J) 13.21 22.7 14.9 16.46 34 59.7 38.77 61.24

-100
-200 -300

spire lenght [mm]

Fig. 5. Forces components vs. spire length (zoom for a single spire) for test 1.

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Fig. 7. CAD models for the two investigated geometries in stamping operations.

Fig. 8. Examples of thinning maps for the two geometries in stamping FEM simulations.

PUNCH FORCE [kN]

the most relevant drawbacks of ISF technologies. Also these aspects were investigated: Allwood (Allwood et al., 2010) proposed to form a partially cut-out blank in order to improve accuracy. Various options for the design of slots and tabs have been evaluated, with and without the use of backing plate. In this paper it was proved that partially cut-out blanks develop a localized deformation earlier, and hence are apparently likely to give more accurate parts. Differently, Duou (Duou et al., 2007a) introduced a laser assisted local heating to reduce stress levels and springback effects, in order to obtain an improvement in terms of geometrical precision. On the other hand, Taleb-Araghi et al. (Taleb-Araghi et al., 2009) proposed an hybrid approach, based on the combined use of stretch forming and ISF, to optimize both accuracy and process duration. The stretch forming is used to create a pre-form in a rst forming step, hence features, such as pockets, corrugations or grooves that are not formed during stretch forming are formed using ISF. In this way, a noticeable reduction of production time compared to AISF is possible. Finally, to enhance the industrial suitability of ISF, Ambrogio et al. (Ambrogio et al., 2011) tested very high speed ranging from 10 m min1 (conventionally utilized for ISF operation) to 1200 m min1. These results lead to assess that the actual process limit is the maximum feed rate available on the CNC machine; the use of high performance machines can allow incremental forming to become a suitable technological alternative to the traditional stamping processes. 1.3. Aim of the paper

70
PUNCH FORCE [kN]

60 50

cone AA-1050

cone AA-5754
pyramid AA-1050 pyramid AA-5754

40
30 20

10
STROKE [mm]

b 140
120
100 80

10

20

30

40

50

cone AA-1050 cone AA-5754 pyramid AA-1050

pyramid AA-5754

In this paper, the authors aim to develop some sustainability guidelines and to promote discussion on limitations, advantages, savings, drawbacks offered by different technologies within sheet metal forming eld. In particular, the contribution is focused on comparing two different operations designed to manufacture a given component: a Single Point Incremental Sheet Forming operation (SPIF) and a classical stamping one. The operations are analyzed from two points of view: quantication of energy required to develop the deformation and material use in each one. In particular, the analysis of the SPIF operation was carried out on the basis of experimental data extracted by the available laboratory

60
40 20
STROKE [mm]

0 0 10 20 30 40 50
Fig. 9. Load curves in stamping for the two thicknesses: 1 mm (a), 1.5 mm (b).

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devices. On the other hand, the stamping operation was numerically investigated since the numerical code provides reliable estimation of required loads. The proposed approach is focused just on a sort of rst step of the analysis: the contribution of forming process design to reduction of process energy consumption and material wasting. These estimations can be surely considered early sustainability indicators for sheet forming processes. More in details, the loads required for a SPIF operation are obviously lower than the one deriving from a stamping operation aimed to produce the same component, but much higher cycle time is necessary; thus, the question is: Is the total required energy lower with SPIF with respect to stamping? Similarly, if material use is considered: SPIF surely require low material quantities since the shapes are obtained exclusively by stretching mechanics. In the following, the two mentioned processes are presented and evaluations of processes energy and material use are illustrated. Moreover, different conditions are taken into account: the investigations were performed on two different materials, two different sheet thicknesses and also on two different nal component geometries in order to develop also a wide sensitivity analysis. More in detail, the investigated process variables are: 1) the component shape which was analyzed by considering two geometries: truncated cones and truncated pyramids; 2) the material properties which was analyzed by considering two different aluminum alloys. In particular, the AA-1050 and the AA-5754 alloys were chosen due to the clear differences on their mechanical properties (Davis, 1998). The AA-1050, in fact,

presents higher ductility together with lower yield and ultimate stress compared to the AA-5754; 3) the sheet thickness which was varied between 1 mm and 1.5 mm. The inuence of the investigated parameters on process energy and material savings shows signicant differences between the two processes (SPIF and stamping). The developed analysis allows to assess some guidelines to compare different processes from a sustainability point of view. In the following sections the two processes will be presented and then a scenario of comparison between them will be discussed. 2. SPIF process analysis 2.1. Experimental set-up for SPIF process A Mazak vertical milling machine was properly equipped to carry out the experimental campaign for the single point incremental forming (SPIF) operations. A slope angle was xed to avoid additional variability in the results comparison; more in particular, a safe condition was chosen for all the cases, corresponding to an angle of 45 . A full experimental campaign was scheduled and eight different SPIF operations were performed (Table 1 reports the conditions of the tests). Process deformation energy was monitored by recording the process forces by a dynamometer placed below the frame utilized to block the sheet during its forming.

Fig. 10. Energy levels and savings for the two different thicknesses.

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The signal is transferred from the working area to specic ampliers by using electrical cables; downstream, a data acquisition system is connected to a computer where the data are recorded. A sketch of the used equipment is reported in Fig. 1. Table 2 summarizes the SPIF process parameters which were kept constant along the whole experimental campaign; an emulsion of mineral oil was used as lubricant to reduce the friction forces between punch and sheet. The symmetry of the two chosen geometries allows to derive the force components along the forming plane (Fx and Fy) from each other for both cone and pyramid shapes makes; therefore, two force components were monitored: just one component along the forming plane (Fx) and the component (Fz) perpendicular to the forming plane (see Fig. 2). The forces trends, experimentally measured, are reported in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. The wall inclination angle (45 ) is relatively far from the critical slope for both the materials (Fratini et al., 2004); therefore, the forces, after the a transitory phase, reaches a steady state condition (Filice et al., 2006; Duou et al.,2007b). Comparing the different trends, the following considerations can be assessed: 1) for the frustum of cone shaped component in AA 1050 alloy, the steady state values of the force components is around 400 N and 700 N for the Fz component while 150 N and 300 N for the Fx component respectively for 1 mm and 1.5 mm, (see Fig. 3a and c). When the AA 5754 alloy is used, instead, the values are more than twice these levels (see Fig. 3b and d).

2) similar considerations can be made for the frustum of pyramid shape. In fact, the geometry seems not to signicantly affect the stationary value for each investigated case for both thicknesses (see Fig. 4a and c) and materials (see Fig. 4b and d). 3) the differences in material properties do not affect the curve shape for each force trend but, obviously, have inuence on their magnitude. 4) thickness increment leads to force increment but the curve trend does not change. 5) each curve is characterized by several peaks which are, periodically, repeated. They are due to the imposed punch movement: at the end of each loop the punch moves of 1 mm along the z direction.

2.2. SPIF process energy calculation Starting from the above force determination, the energy required for the SPIF processes can be calculated. In particular, the total energy was considered by following the force components along the corresponding tool movement, spire after spire. A zoom of a single spire extracted by a test with truncated cone part geometry is reported in Fig. 5; more in detail, the spire refers to test 1 (see again Table 1). At the beginning of the spire, the tool moves along z-direction and energy (Ez) can be calculated knowing the force value and the entity of the z-direction displacement. As well, the energy Ex (and similarly Ey) is absorbed while the punch moves along x-direction (y-direction); more in particular, its magnitude can be calculated by the Fx (Fy) value and the x-component

Fig. 11. Energy levels and savings for the two materials.

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(y-component) of the displacement (which is known as the geometry of the part and the tool path are known). Similar considerations can be done for the truncated pyramid (Fig. 6); in this case, the zoomed spire refers to test 7 (Table 1). In the z-direction again the energy can be calculated at the beginning of each spire while in x-direction the energy is calculated considering the maximum values of Fx component which is reached while the tools moves along x-direction (lower values in Fx correspond to tool movement along y-direction); the same considerations can be developed to calculate energy in y-direction. Basing on the above model, the energy required for the ISF operations was calculated by summing the components in the three directions; therefore a precise estimation of ISF energy consumption during the deformation process can be obtained. The values of the planar (Ex Ey) and normal energy (Ez) components are reported for all the tests (Table 3). As expected, the AA 5754 alloys require higher energy values and pyramid shape implies higher energies due to the major total displacement. Moreover, it is evident that the major energy consumption in SPIF is related to the displacement over the planar directions.

3. Stamping process analysis 3.1. Stamping simulation results As far as the stamping processes energy evaluation is regarded, numerical simulation was utilized. The explicit commercial code Dynaform was utilized to reproduce the process and starting from the CAD model all the tools were built as shown in Fig. 7.

The utilized materials were modeled through the Barlat- Lian yield criterion considering an isotropic hardening law. The blanks were meshed trough full integrated quadrilateral shell element with 7 integration points along the thickness. Moreover a three level geometric remeshing strategy was applied, thus, the total number of elements at the end of the forming simulation is higher than 8000 as the cone is regarded and more than 10000 for the frustum of pyramid. As far as the punch velocity is regarded, an articially increased value equal to 1 m s1 was utilized, checking that the kinetic energy was less than 10% of the deformation work, in order to avoid any inertia effect. Frictional actions were considered through a Coulomb model with a coefcient equal to 0.12. The blank-holder force (BHF) and the initial blank shape were properly chosen for each operation in order to perform a comparative analysis of the processes for all the investigated factors, i.e. materials, thicknesses and of geometries. As far as the BHF is regarded, a constant value was considered for all the processes taken into account; of course, the BHF value varies at the varying of the part shape and of the utilized material. The value was designed in order to obtain a maximum thinning of about 20%. Such choice was driven by the will to avoid excessive thinning and prevent wrinkling occurrence. On the other hand, the starting blank shape was designed with the aim to minimize the wasted (trimmed out) material after the forming processes. In particular, for the cone shape a circular starting blank was selected due to the process symmetry, whilst, as the frustum of pyramid is concerned, a trial and error approach was developed to nd the most suitable starting blank shape. As it can be observed in Fig. 8 (reporting two thinning numerical maps) the initial blank shapes allow to cover just the die llet radii.

Fig. 12. Energy levels and savings for the two shapes.

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3.2. Stamping energy calculation At the end of each numerical simulation the punch load vs. punch stroke curve was determined (Fig. 9) and the surface underneath the load curve was calculated to obtain the deformation energy. As expected, the trends of the load curves are quite different at the varying of the material (as for SPIF operations) while part geometry does not signicantly affect the load results for given material (the slight difference at the end of the stroke is due to the different part shape). This trend is the same considering a 1.5 mm thick sheet; of course all the curves are shifted up due to increase of the thickness and, as a consequence, of the strength the material offers to the deformation action. The translation of these curves in terms of energy consumption amount shows that such amount is very sensitive at the varying of the material and of the thickness. Such results are discussed in details in the following section. 4. Discussion of the results 4.1. SPIF energy results The analysis of the energy results for SPIF was carried out taking into account the most relevant inuences from the process and material parameters. In particular, the major effects were evidenced in order to highlight the trend of inuence determined by each parameter on energy saving. From this point of view, Fig. 10

evidences the inuence of thickness reduction on energy saving: such saving is calculated as the percentage of energy reduction obtained by reducing the thickness for from 1.5 mm to 1 mm. As it can be observed at the increasing of the thickness the deformation energy increases for each couple of shape and material; it is possible to notice that for the pyramid shape, the energy saving decreases with respect to cone shape (from the couple of values 48e44% to the couple of values 29e30%). Furthermore, the energy saving amount at the varying of the thickness is almost the same for the two materials (compare 48% with 44% as well as 29% with 30% savings). Another observation is related to the increase of the energy requirement at the increasing of the material strength: this trend is more evident in the following Fig. 11, where the energy savings due to material change are highlighted. In particular, the percentage savings are calculated considering the reduction obtained utilizing AA-1050 instead of AA-5754 for the different couples shapethickness. More in particular, material change is responsible of the highest energy variation; in fact, regardless of the other investigated variables, the energy saving is always equal to about 60%. Finally, the inuence of the shape is showed in Fig. 12. The most immediate observation is that the pyramid shape always requires more energy than the cone one. This result is mainly due to the fact that the pyramid requires a longer tool path. Actually, the force values are not so different at the varying of the shape; in fact, slightly higher values are obtained for the planar

Fig. 13. Energy levels and savings for the two different thicknesses in stamping.

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Energy [J]

3000

1 mm
80%

2957

90%

80%

69%
63%

70%

2000
Energy_Stamping

60%

1500

Energy_SPIF % Stamping energy saving

2052 1252

50%

40%

1000 774 768

790

30%

20% 500
243 253

10%

0%

cone (AA- 1050)

cone (AA- 5754)

pyramid (AA- 1050)

pyramid (AA- 5754)

Fig. 14. Energy levels and savings for the two different processes for 1 mm thickness.

Energy [J]

1.5 mm

4211

90%

4000

3500

75% 71% 69% 70%

3000

Energy_Stamping Energy_SPIF

60%

2500

% Stamping energy saving

50%

2000 1758 1500 1482

40%

30% 1161 1203 20%

1000

500

372

389

10%

0
cone (AA- 1050) cone (AA- 5754) pyramid (AA- 1050) pyramid (AA- 5754)
Fig. 15. Energy levels and savings for the two different processes for 1.5 mm thickness.

0%

Energy saving (stamping) [%]

3695

78%

80%

Energy saving (stamping) [%]

2500

73%

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force components when cone shape is produced. As it can be observed, at the increasing of the thickness the differences in terms of energy consumption decrease. Moreover, when AA-5754 is used a slight decreasing is also noticeable.

As already observed for the punch load vs stroke curves (see again Fig. 9) no signicant changes are noticeable in terms of required energy at the varying of the nal shape. 4.3. Comparative energy analysis

4.2. Stamping energy results The same analysis on energy savings was performed for the stamping process. The obtained trends for the percentage energy saving are more regular than the ones above discussed for SPIF. This result is related to the circumstance that the punch stroke is always the same at the varying of the shape and, as a consequence, only the punch load inuences the energy consumption amount. The energy saving amount at the varying of the thickness is reported in Fig. 13. It is possible to notice that deforming a thicker sheet always requires higher energy and the energy saving due to the thickness variation from 1.5 mm to 1 mm is always around 35% for each considered conguration. Moreover, the energy consumption is almost insensitive to the shape changes; actually, no signicant changes were observed in force values at the varying of the shape. Even for stamping, as already observed for SPIF, the material change led to the highest variation in energy consumption amount. The energy saving is always about 70% and it remains the same for all the congurations.

The more relevant analysis was performed comparing the energy results for the two investigated operations. Some assessments can be derived from such analysis:  in all the cases the energy consumption in SPIF is signicantly higher than the one in stamping operations. Such result derives from the consideration that even if higher forces act during stamping with respect to SPIF, the total displacement during SPIF is much higher than the one occurring in stamping. The proportions between the two factors contributing to energy (force and displacement) determine the difference of the total energy (see Figs. 14e16) leading to the conclusion that in this sense stamping is highly preferable;  the energy saving slightly decreases utilizing a material characterized by higher strength;  instead the energy saving increases if a pyramid is deformed with respect to the cone shape;  comparing Figs. 14 and 15, it can be observed that with 1.5 mm thickness higher energy savings are reached by stamping when a cone shape is deformed (compare 69% with 75% as well as 63% with 69% savings). When a pyramid shape has to be

Fig. 16. Overview of the energy results for the investigated conditions.

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investigated case a frame dimension equal to 10 mm was considered all along the sheet outline. In stamping operation, as mentioned, the initial blank shape was optimized in order minimize material wasting. Table 4 shows the corresponding area values together with the saving of material allowed by ISF. 5. Conclusions In this paper a sensitivity analysis was performed to evaluate the differences between a classical stamping operation and a SPIF one in terms of deformation energy and material use. In particular, different parameters were varied: the utilised aluminum alloy, the sheet thickness and the nal component geometry. For both the process an estimation of the deformation energy was performed for all the parameters investigated congurations. The energy evaluation here reported is just a part of the total energy each process requires. Actually, the total process energy includes also the components related to idle times and auxiliary operations which may be relevant. Nevertheless, the comparison between two processes, which are so different from each other in their mechanics, gives a rst overview on the signicant differences between them in terms of energy consumption. Such results are a starting point to compare and choose the most energy efcient operation for manufacturing a given part. Moreover, an investigation on the possibilities to reduce resource utilization was useful. Actually, the main aspect is related to material savings, therefore, an analysis on the utilized material amount was performed too. The results reported in the previous sections allow to carry out a main conclusive assessment:  all over the conditions, the SPIF process always implies a deformation energy which is signicantly higher than the one required by stamping. On the other hand, SPIF allows a certain material saving;  stamping allows less energy saving when a material characterized by higher strength is considered while an higher energy saving is reached by stamping deforming a pyramid shape (with respect to the saving obtained for a cone shape);  as SPIF is concerned expected trend in energy saving were obtained at the varying of material, part shape, thickness. Actually, material has the greatest inuence on energy saving in the analyzed conditions; such consideration is also valid for stamping;  as stamping is concerned, no signicant variations were observed in energy saving at the varying of the part shape while thickness inuence is signicant. The paper proposes an analysis aimed to empirically evidence the cause-effect linkages between process and material parameters and environmental burdens. Such linkages should shorten the gap which is still present comparing the environmental impact evaluations of forming and machining processes. The analysis boundaries should be enlarged moving beyond process view point to product one or even to plant one in order to take into account all the involved production issues (from raw materials to recycling, from primary material production to process exibility topics). References
Abu-Farha, F.K., Khraisheh, M.K., 2008. An integrated approach to the superplastic forming of lightweight alloys: towards sustainable manufacturing. Int. J. Sustainable Manuf. 1, 18e40.

Fig. 17. Blank shapes.

produced, on the contrary, similar savings are reached by stamping (compare 80% with 78% as well as 73% with 71% savings). The most relevant conclusion to be assessed, derived from the above reported considerations, is that the difference in terms of energy consumption is so high that the SPIF energy is always much higher that the stamping one. In order to offer an overview of the energy values and to further outline the considerations above mentioned the following summarizing graphic is worth analyzing. 4.4. Material saving comparison The comparison of the two processes was completed by an estimation of the possible material saving. Actually, the use of a given material implies its impact in terms of primary production with the consequent CO2 emissions, and also the impact of the possible material recycling. In the present application two aluminum alloys are investigated each one carrying its environmental footprint. Actually, the environmental impact of aluminum alloys could be quantied by data available in the technical literature (Ashby, 2009) starting from the amount of material utilized for a given process. Therefore it was important also to develop some estimations about the material saving for the two processes which was performed based on the initial blank material necessary for the two operations respectively. The comparison of the initial blank shapes are presented in Fig. 17. The strong difference in deformation mechanics between the considered processes leads to a different material use. It is important to underline that the material quantities imply different weight but also different energy necessary to produce the sheets. Actually, in a conventional stamping process the material owing toward the die cavity drives the whole process and localized thinning phenomena occur. On the other hand, the SPIF process is characterized by stretching mechanics and the deformation is obtained by reducing the sheet thickness. In SPIF an initial blank shape larger than the largest spire has to be considered in order to allow a proper clamping; in the
Table 4 Material savings. Shape Truncated Truncated Truncated Truncated Cone Cone Pyramid Pyramid Process Stamping SPIF Stamping SPIF Area [mm2] 21124 18870 26336 24025 Material saving [%] e 10.67% e 8.78%

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