Mesh-free simulation of automotive decklid inner panel

Meshfree methods have been well recognized for their capability of delivering high solution accuracy for large strain problems. To make the methods available for manufacturing applications, over the past two years we have further developed the Element-Free-Galerkin-based meshfree shell formulation for better solution accuracy and computation efficiency, and implemented the method into the commercial solver, LS-DYNA. This paper presents the application of the meshfree shell formulation in the study of NUMISHEET 2005 benchmark testing example, that is, forming analysis of an automotive decklid inner panel. Both the physical drawbead geometry and its effective line bead model are considered in the simulations to study the effect of different drawbead modeling schemes on the accuracy of the forming analysis. The meshfree simulations are compared with the best available finite element analysis in terms of solution accuracy.