UC Merced

The increased use of sheet metal products in automotive, construction, and aerospace industries leads to investigate more precise, economic and sustainable sheet metal bending techniques. The conventional sheet metal bending processes often require costly shape-dedicated die/mold set and special high tonnage machinery. Origami-based sheet metal (OSM) bending can overcome the challenge and achieve precision, simplicity, and minimum machinery/equipment requirement by implementing origami principle on sheet metal. To date, there are very limited attempts to understand and explore OSM bending in manufacturing research community. The bottleneck that hinders OSM bending from wide usage is due to lack of understanding of the OSM bending mechanics in metal sheets. The dissertation focus on expanding the knowledge about OSM bending from mechanics point of view.This work relies on computational, experimental, analytical approaches to present investigations on fundamentals of OSM bending mechanics. The focus is the correlation between manufacturing parameters of OSM bending and the resulting bending process mechanics. Specically, I introduced OSM into a conventional bending process, wiping die bending, to investigate eect of OSM in terms of required bending force, bending accuracy, and deformation. Then, OSM bending is conceptualized and parameters associated to both OSM bending process and OSM design process are determined. A general guide has been made as to selection of these parameters. In the next step, the required bending force for OSM bending is formulated with experimental and analytical approach. It was discovered that the topology of the material discontinuity has a unique shape factor that impacts magnitude of the OSM bending force. Further, the deformation behavior of OSM under tension and shear loading are investigated. Finally, fracture prediction in OSM bending is explored considering the eect of material discontinuity (MD) scale and sheet thickness. The result indicated that the higher the scale is, the less likely a fracture happens. The higher the thickness of the sheet is, the more likely a fracture occurs. The possibility of fracture is also associated with topology of the MDs.