Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Stamp Forming of Thermoplastic Composite Wing Rib

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to address two critical aspects involved in the stamp forming of a thermoplastic composite wing rib: tooling design and process development. A commercial finite element code has been used for forming simulation in the early phase of tooling design and process development to study the material deformation of a blank and a variety of tooling design concepts. In this paper, two selected design concepts are presented and compared. An extensive experimental investigation was carried out to assess the quality of numerical simulation results and also to evaluate the relationship between process parameters and resulting quality of a stamp formed wing rib. The design-of-experiments has been utilized to generate sampling points required for the physical experiments.