Additive manufacturing allows for local reinforcement of sheet metal. One process limitation when using directed energy deposition (DED) is the distortion caused by thermal effects. In order to better understand the distortion of sheet metal components, the influences of process and workpiece on the distortion are analyzed. Tailored additive blanks with different degree of distortion are deep drawn in order to investigate the influence of distortion on the formability. The experimental results show that although the DED induces significant distortion which can compromise blank positioning, the subsequent deep drawing can compensate this distortion, enabling robust utilization of tailored additive blanks.
März et al. (2026) studied this question.