FEA and experimental research on the aluminum alloy stretch forming process for complicated air intake skin

As one of the typical forming operations in sheet metal forming, stretch forming is widely applied to shape aircraft skin parts. In this paper, the numerical simulation of aluminum alloy stretch forming process for a complicated air intake skin and its experimental validation are carried out. Based on the elongation rate and the wrap angle, three stretching schemes are defined using ASSFCAE/FET1200 software [1] developed by authors. The forming process was simulated with ABAQUS/Explicit and springback analysis was made by ABAQUS/Standard. In order to verify the accuracy of the loading path obtained in FEA, experiment of aircraft air intake skin stretch forming process is successfully carried out on the FET1200 stretching machine. The experiment result shows that the consecutive stretch scheme adopted is the best scheme and the finite element simulation is very useful for the forming of the aircraft skin component.