Inline Monitoring of the Geometry of Free-form Bent Components

The free-form bending process shows a high potential for the manufacturing of bent structural components. Especially in the automotive sector, the process can be employed for the production of arbitrary geometries evolving in the 3D-space, reducing tooling costs and production times. In addition, it is characterised by an outstanding flexibility, and allows the manufacturing of variants of a single component just with the adaption of the tool kinematics. Nevertheless, the reproducibility of the process is a challenging task, and a process monitoring approach is required. In this contribution, an inline-measurement strategy for evaluating the resulting geometry of free-form bent parts is developed. First, a review of the actual measurement system is given. Successively, the inline measurement of the bending radius using a laser displacement sensor, as well as of the bending angle by means of an IR-camera are presented. The obtained inline signals are then processed to retrieve the geometry of the obtained part, and the strategy is validated by comparison with the offline measurement results. The developed inline-system represents the first step towards the development and the monitoring of the free-form bending process.