A Comprehensive Review on the Incremental Forming of Polycarbonate Sheets

The incremental sheet forming is born as an excellent alternative to other material forming pro-cedures to deform incrementally flat metal sheets into the preferred complex three-dimensional profile. The main characteristics of this process are its versatility and cost-effectiveness; in addition, it allows for reaching greater formability, compared to conventional sheet forming processes. Re-cently, its use has been extended to polymers and composites. The following review aims to present the current state of the art of the incremental sheet forming of polycarbonate, an outstanding en-gineering plastic, starting from the first studies on the feasibility of this process applied to polymers. Attention is given to the advantages, drawbacks and main applications of the incrementally formed polycarbonate sheets, as well as the influence of the process parameters and the toolpath strategies on features like formability, forming forces, deformation and failure mechanisms, geometric accu-racy, surface quality, etc. Moreover, new hybrid forming methods for process optimization are presented. Finally, a discussion is provided on the technical challenges and research directions for incremental sheet forming of polycarbonate, and more generally thermoplastics, in the future. Therefore, this review aims to offer an extensive overview of the incremental forming of polycar-bonate sheets, useful to academic and industrial researchers who work on this topic.