Model Prediction of Defects in Sheet Metal Forming Processes
Model Prediction of Defects in Sheet Metal Forming Processes
Model Prediction of Defects in Sheet Metal Forming Processes
1 Introduction
properties, tooling geometry and process parameters, makes it difficult for engi-
neers to accurately predict the occurrence of forming problems, such as crack-
ing, localized necking, springback, among others. Also, the apparently random
occurrence of forming defects due to sources of scatter (e.g. material proper-
ties, tooling geometry and process parameters) adds further complexity to the
problem of defects prediction.
In this context, machine learning techniques may aid to solve this problem. In
particular, they can be trained with available data for building defects prediction
models. The rationale is that the models can generalize in unseen data and
successfully identify and check such defect patterns.
Although it is certain that the machine learning technique is a viable method
to be applied in the manufacturing industry to discover the origin of the defects,
as described above, it is valid to point it out that there is, first, a necessity
to discover how to build a model capable of learn the favorable conditions and
actions for the defect to appear in a metal component.
Once this model is developed and with the knowledge of how to avoid the
most common problems of the manufacturing of sheet metal, the process could
be improved since the industry would be able to invest on the best materials for
the production of certain pieces and with this simple measure it would also save
time and money by not having to discard the defective pieces.
The focus on this paper is to create a model capable of learn about the
conditions that will cause the defects to appear in a metal component, evaluate
the results generated by the created model and perform a thorough comparison
of machine learning models to verify which algorithms are capable to provide
good results to solve the prediction problem. In summary, it aims to make a
comparison of the results achieved by applying machine learning, through its
algorithms, to predict defects in the manufacturing process of sheet metals.
In Sect. 2 the experimental sheet metal forming background will be described.
The proposed approach used in this experiment will be detailed in Section 3.
The results will be showed and discussed in Sect. 4. Finally, the conclusions are
presented in Sect. 5.
2 Background
Sheet metal forming is a manufacturing process that is widely used in the pro-
duction of metal components for the most diverse industries, namely for the auto-
motive, naval, aeronautical, machinery and household appliances industries [1].
In this process, metal sheets are plastically deformed into a desired shape by the
action of forming tools, which typically consist of a punch, a die and a blank
holder.
Firstly, a blank (i.e. non-deformed metal sheet) is placed over the die, and
then it is pressed into the die by the movement of the punch to obtain the
desired shape; the flow of the sheet material into the die is typically controlled
Model Prediction of Defects in Sheet Metal Forming Processes 171
with a blank holder. In general, sheet metal forming processes allow obtaining
high quality components with high cadence and low cost; however, the variability
inherent to mechanical properties, tool geometry and process parameters makes
formed components often prone to defects such as wrinkling, tearing, excessive
thinning and springback.
These defects can appear in any step of a forming process, and it can be
very difficult to predict the location and the moment that they occur due to
the large amount of variables involved in the process. The ever-increasing com-
petitiveness in the automotive and aeronautical industries has demanded very
high quality and robustness requirements, particularly in components that have
a direct impact on occupant safety.
In this regard, the Finite Element Method (FEM) is a well-established com-
putational tool that plays a key role in predicting defect-prone regions in com-
ponents. Recently, some authors integrated statistical descriptions of variability
within FEM, for assessing the sensitivity of defect predictions to scatter [1–3].
However, the integration of finite element analysis with statistical tools involves
a high computational effort, incompatible with the response time required by
the industry.
The design of the forming process of a metal component requires a high
level of knowledge and is still very dependent on industrial experience. The use
of computational tools to support design (CAD), planning (CAPP), engineer-
ing (CAE) and manufacturing (CAM) has contributed to facilitate analysis and
reduce design time. However, it is always necessary for specialists to make deci-
sions at different stages.
processes such as casting [6], rolling [7,8], extrusion [9] and sheet metal form-
ing [10,11]. However, to our knowledge, no comparative study was performed so
far on different machine learning algorithms for the prediction of defects in sheet
metal forming processes.
The two identified defects, springback and maximum thinning, were sepa-
rated to create a binary classification with 1 (defects) and 0 (non-defects) to be
considered in the simulator.
Accordingly, a defect exists if the final score is higher than the reference val-
ues shown in Table 2, which were obtained from the numerical simulations of the
reference materials in Table 1. Both DP600 and HSLA340 had 170 FEM simula-
tion runs performed, while Mild Steel had 174 FEM simulation runs performed.
All the numerical simulations were carried out with the DD3IMP in-house FEM
code, developed and optimized for simulating sheet metal forming processes [13].
The dataset for this experiment was created with the values of each input vari-
able with it’s respective final score, for each defect type in each material type.
There is no easy way to know which algorithm will have the best performance to
solve a proposed problem. Usually, it is difficult to understand the factors that
affect the performance of a specific algorithm on a problem well enough to make
the decisions the algorithm selection problem requires with confidence [14].
Five algorithms were randomly selected through machine learning disciplines.
Three of them were classification algorithms, one is a regression algorithm and
the last one is a statistical learning algorithm. The selected algorithms for the
research design is presented in the following list:
The models were built from the scratch using python v3.6.2 and related
libraries, such as SciPy Ecosystem and Scikit-learn, based on this methodol-
ogy [20]. Six machine learning models were created for two defects types in each
metal type. The data was normalized for all the algorithms performances because
the models results when it used normalized data were better, specially for the
Multilayer Perceptron algorithm.
In addition, for all the models the same configuration with random weights
was used in order to be possible to perform the model’s results comparison. A
brief description of each algorithm can be seen below.
Naive Bayes (NB): The Naive Bayes classifiers are probabilistic classifiers
based on applying Bayes’ theorem, greatly simplify learning by assuming that
features are independent and important given class [18].
The results were obtained by each model and were analyzed individually.
The final results showed that the classification algorithms successfully predicted
the defects in the considered materials. However, we noticed that there was not
unanimity and the SVM algorithm was the best predicting the springback defect
in the metal DP600, but even so, the MLP score was only 0.12% worse than
the SVM score, meaning both models could provide comparable The Table 4
demonstrate the greatest outcomes for each defect-material combination.
Although, in this first moment, it was not possible to evaluate the accuracy of
machine learning models with real data due to the unavailability of the data, the
final outcomes showed there are different models that performed better for each
type of material and its associate defects. Therefore, the next steps will demand
models adjustments to take the best of each model. In this way, a more confident
conclusion of which machine learning algorithm is apt to predict defects more
accurately in real scenarios.
5 Conclusion
Based on this experiment results, it is possible to have more than one option to
build a machine learning model that is able to produce satisfactory outputs in
regard of the defect prediction in a manufacturing environment. Whilst most of
the scores had similar results independently of the material type or the defect
class, an argument can be made in favor of the classification algorithms, because
they had the best performance results for the accuracy and AUC parameters.
In this sense, it would be a safe selection to use them as a standard choice to
execute this type of prediction.
Although some algorithms did not perform well in some environments, as in
case of a specific material-defect combination, it could have happened because
of the small size of the training dataset, since the machine learning algorithms
overall could learn better with larger samples of data, in accordance with each
specific situation. That is why the usage of larger samples of data is one aspect
that could be improved in the future to achieve better results.
Model Prediction of Defects in Sheet Metal Forming Processes 179
References
1. Huang, C., Radi, B., Hami, A.: Uncertainty analysis of deep drawing using sur-
rogate model based probabilistic method. Int. J. Adv. Manuf. Technol. 86, 9–12
(2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-016-8436-4
2. Wiebenga, J.H., Atzema, E.H., An, Y.G., Vegter, H., Boogaard, A.H.: Effect of
material scatter on the plastic behavior and stretchability in sheet metal form-
ing. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 214(2), 238–252 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.jmatprotec.2013.08.008
3. Prates, P.A., Adaixo, A.S., Oliveira, M.C., et al.: Numerical study on the effect
of mechanical properties variability in sheet metal forming processes. Int. J. Adv.
Manuf. Technol., pp. 1–20 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-016-8436-4
4. Alpaydin, E.: Introduction to Machine Learning, 3rd edn. The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, London (2016)
5. Aleem, S., Capretz, L.F., Ahmed, F.: Benchmarking machine learning techniques
for software defect detection. Proc. Int. J. Softw. Eng. Appl. (IJSEA) 6. Western
University, London, Ontario, Canada (2015)
6. Santos, I., Nieves, J., Penya, Y.K., Bringas, P.G.: Optimising machine-learning-
based fault prediction in foundry production. In: Proceedings of IWANN 2009:
Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Soft Computing,
and Ambient Assisted Living. Caligny, France and Bamberg, Germany (2009)
7. Lieber, D., Stolpe, M., Konrada, B., Deuse, J., Morik, K.: Quality prediction in
interlinked manufacturing processes based on supervised & unsupervised machine
learning. Procedia CIRP 7, 193–198 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2013.
05.033
8. Siyang, T., Xu, K.: An algorithm for surface defect identification of steel plates
based on genetic algorithm and extreme learning machine. Metals - Open Access
Metall. J. 7, 311 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3390/met7080311
9. Barcellona, A.: Neural network techniques for metal forming design. In: Pro-
ceedings of the Thirtieth International MATADOR Conference. Palgrave, London
(1993)
180 M. Dib et al.
10. Wang, J., Wu, X., Thomson, P.F., Flitman, A.: A neural networks approach
to investigating the geometrical influence on wrinkling in sheet metal forming.
J. Mater. Process. Technol. 105, 215–220 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0924-
0136(00)00534-3
11. Wenjuan, L., Qiang, L., Feng, R., Zhiyong, L., Hongyang, Q.: Springback prediction
for sheet metal forming based on GA-ANN technology. J. Mater. Process. Technol.
187–188, 227–231 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2006.11.087
12. Bouvier, S., Teodosiu, C., Maier, C., Banu, M., Tabacaru, V.: Selection and identifi-
cation of elastoplastic models for the materials used in the benchmarks. 18-Months
Progress Report of the Digital Die Design Systems (3DS) (2001)
13. Menezes, L.F., Teodosiu, C.: Three-dimensional numerical simulation of the deep-
drawing process using solid finite elements. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 97, 100–106
(2000). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0924-0136(99)00345-3
14. Kotthoff, L., Gent, I., Miguel, I.: A preliminary evaluation of machine learning in
algorithm selection for search problems. In: Proceedings of The Fourth Interna-
tional Symposium on Combinatorial Search. University of St. Andrews, Scotland,
UK (2011)
15. Collobert, R., Bengio, S.: Links between perceptrons, MLPs and SVMs. In: Pro-
ceedings of the 21st International Conference on Machine Learning. Banff, Canada
(2004)
16. Breiman, L.: Random Forests. Statistics Department, University of California
Berkeley, CA, USA (2001)
17. Han, J., Kamber, M., Jian, P.: Data Mining Concepts and Techniques, 3rd edn.
Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2011)
18. Rish, I.: An Empirical Study of the Naive Bayes Classifier. IBM Research Division,
Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA (2001)
19. Cortes, C., Vapnik, V.: Support-vector networks. Mach. Learn. 20, 273–297 (1995).
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00994018
20. Brownlee, J.: Machine Learning Mastery With Python: Understand Your Data,
Create Accurate Models and Work Projects End-To-End, 1.4th edn. Jason
Brownlee, Melbourne, Australia (2016)
21. Fawcett, T.: An introduction to ROC analysis. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 27, 861–874
(2006)