Quantification of the Impact of Forming-Induced Residual Stresses on Subsequent Cutting Operations for Aluminum AA7075 Thick Sheets

Residual stresses in metal components induced by forming operations significantly influence subsequent manufacturing steps. In particular, two aspects for the final processing of formed thick sheets by cutting and machining operations result: First, the achievable geometric accuracy is limited by distortion due to the modification of residual stresses across the process step sequence. In addition, the residual stresses present in the final component are determined by the process parameter settings of the individual substeps. In this work, the influence of the forming-induced residual stresses on a subsequent cutting operation was quantitatively investigated. For this purpose, the step sequence of forming and wet abrasive cutting for aluminum AA7075 thick sheets was implemented both numerically and experimentally. This allows the residual stress redistribution to be taken into account in future virtual setups of the production chain by specifically adjusting the process parameters.