Abstract: Materials lightweighting and structures lightweighting are the two effective way of reducing the overall weight of vehicles, in which fiber reinforced composites have increasingly used in automobile design and manufacturing as a result of light weight and high special strength. In order to improve the manufacturing efficiency and reduce the cost for composite parts formed by traditional composite forming processes, a non-isothermal mould stamping method is proposed to directly form a composite part. The mould is locally heated up to a specified temperature, and then the deformation regions of the composite sheets are heated up to a preassigned temperature by contact heat transfer with die. Taking advantage of the resin matrix becoming soft after being heated to a certain temperature, the heated sheets are formed gradually by the die movement, and then solidified in the cooling die. Thermal deep drawing experiments of a group of hemisphere composite parts are conducted and the effect of forming temperature on stamping process is analyzed. Results show that carbon fiber composite sheets have good stamping performance and good sphere quality. The stamping process has high forming efficiency and as a result of softening of resin, in the deep drawing process, stamping load deceases with the increasing of forming temperature.

Key words: Carbon fiber composite sheet, Nonisothermal heating, Shear angle, Thermal deep drawing, Thermostamping