Simulation and Validation of an Incremental Bending Process for Cylindrical Fuselage Components

In the aviation industry, a large number of processes are not digitalised. Simultaneously, many special processes are used in production, such as incremental bending. In order to model and efficiently design multi-stage processes with methods such as FEM, automation and linking of the individual simulations are necessary. This paper therefore presents a method for automatically simulating and evaluating a complete incremental bending process with 24 strokes in LS-Dyna using a Python framework with cfiles. The final validation of the force–displacement relationships and inner radii of the generated scaled fuselage shell show high prediction accuracies of about 90%. Thus, the presented methodology enables a FEM-based process design of incremental bending in the aviation industry.