Thermoplastics are strongly used in the manufacturing industry [1] because of their good properties like light-weight, strength, corrosion resistance, price, etc. Typical parts made of them are manufactured with operations oriented to mass production both for the energy costs and the investments in equipment and tools; they provide for repetitive actions of heating, shaping, and cooling [2]. Furthermore, processes usually employed in sheet metal forming are frequently considered to manufacture thermoplastic sheet components with different shapes [3]; in these cases, the forming processes strongly depend on the material properties and the temperature [4].
Recently, the significant advances in the use of computers applied to manufacturing have augmented the interest in developing procedures with a higher level of flexibility: consider, for example, the incredible development of additive manufacturing technologies [5]. The incremental sheet forming (ISF) moves along the same lines: it is a relatively recent technology that guarantees high customization, thanks to the layered manufacturing principle typical of rapid prototyping, and cost-effectiveness, because it does not require dedicated equipment. In this process, which guarantees high levels of materials’ formability and the carrying out at room temperature, a forming tool controlled by a CNC machine describes a path and deforms progressively a clamped sheet; by doing so, it manufactures the final part geometry [6] starting from sheets of pure metals, alloys, polymers, and composites [7, 8].
ISF is an effective alternative to conventional technologies based on heating-shaping-cooling manufacturing operations. Thanks to its flexibility, this process is strongly oriented toward the production of batches with small and medium size; in addition, it allows reducing energy consumption, compared to conventional processes, so as shown by recent researches on polymer forming [9].
The firsts studies on the polymer ISF concerned polyvinylchloride (PVC) sheets [10], before being extended to other commercial polymers [11] and new materials like the biocompatible polycaprolactone (PCL) [4]. Once checked the feasibility of the process, significant researches were carried out to investigate the influence of the main process parameters on the formability limits of different polymers like polyamide (PA), polycarbonate (PC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), PVC and polypropylene (PP) [12–15]. The way to better estimate the formability limits was investigated in [2, 16], while new solutions to improve the quality of the ISF polymer parts represents a very hot focus; consider, for example, a prior cold-rolling process of the sheets [17] or their self-heating as the effect of the feed rate and the spindle [18].
Failure and defect modes that interest ISF sheets represent another significant field of investigation, since they influence the materials’ formability and worsen the geometrical accuracy of ISF parts [4, 19]. When incrementally formed, polymer sheets can be affected by ductile fracture at the transition zone between the wall and the corner radius or tearing along the walls, as well as defects like wrinkling and twisting [10]; these ones are strictly connected, since wrinkles can be twisted around the axis of revolution in the direction of tool rotation. The twisting phenomenon is common for all the ISF materials, but it is particularly relevant for materials with soft behaviour like thermoplastics; consider, for example, that twist angles on axisymmetric components obtained by a unidirectional toolpath were equal to about 6° and 22° for aluminum alloy [20] and polycarbonate sheets [21], respectively. This defect is caused by an uncontrolled pivoting of the formed components around the clamping frame, because of the in-plane shear generated by the tangential forces that the forming tool exerts on the sheet; in addition, it is more probable for higher and more regular plane forces, which determine a combination of continued strain accumulation and asymmetric strain levels [22, 23] and, considering polymer sheets, higher normal forces can determine significant indentation that accentuates the phenomenon [24, 25].
A way to reduce this defectiveness is to choose a more suitable toolpath strategy. For example, a dramatic reduction of the twisting phenomenon was observed by adopting an alternate toolpath instead of a unidirectional one, so as verified in [6] and, for PC parts, in [21]; by doing so, the amount of twist produced in a layer was recovered in the successive one almost completely. Despite this, severe forming conditions in terms of sliding forces on thin thermoplastic sheets, characterized by low mechanical resistance, can induce significant instability and generate wrinkling, also using an alternate toolpath strategy [26].
Monitoring and measuring the ISF forming forces represents an efficient tool for the control of the process quality [27]; their reduction limits the risk of failures and defects on the ISF polymer sheets and on the tools, as well as can improve the surfaces’ quality of the components, and allows reducing or avoiding lubricants to lower friction and sticking of material to the tool. These aspects can also involve energy implications that are of relevant interest in a perspective of sustainable manufacturing, since they can determine a positive impact on the environment [28, 29].
According to what reported above, a way to reduce the defect phenomena on ISF polymer sheets provides for acting on toolpath strategies that lower the forming forces in the sheet plane, in line with previous authors’ numerical works [30, 31]. The single-point incremental forming (SPIF), i.e. the simplest variant of ISF that involves the use of a simple tool, a clamping frame, and the absence of dies, was used in this work to manufacture cone frusta with fixed wall angle starting from thin PC sheets; the forming process was carried out by setting typical ISF parameters [21] and four different unidirectional helical trajectory-based toolpath strategies. From the experimental campaign, some important features like the forming forces, the twist angle and the surface roughness were analyzed, as well as the deformation states, the failures and the defects were monitored, to investigate the influence of the selected toolpath strategies on the defectiveness of incrementally formed polymer parts.