The majority of industrial sheet forming still takes place with the use of dedicated tools and dies. This makes prototyping using forming expensive and slow, since new dies are made for each new part. The tools themselves are typically machined, wasting volumes of material, and requiring a time-consuming design. At the same time however, it holds back aspects of mass production.
Contrary to this, we know from craft processes that it is possible to form a huge range of parts without dedicated tools. A new field has emerged in recent decades which aims to produce flexible processes. These typically are capable of a large range of geometries without the need to produce new tools. The most prominent example has been Incremental Sheet Forming, however that presents springback issues since the boundary is clamped during forming.
Hence, the effort to produce new concepts for flexible forming is ongoing and is usually an incremental technology. One of the most exciting processes originating from Julian Allwood's group in Cambridge was the mandrel-free spinning machine. In my three years there, I developed significant experience with that process and I am currently continuing that collaboration. The main focus of my work there though was concerned with automating the design of new processes. We used an inverse method to approach this problem.
