3-D SIMULATION OF METAL-FORMING PROCESSES WITH AUTOMATIC MESH GENERATION

The numerical simulation of industrial metal forming processes requires robust and feasible solution methods. In this context, any solution procedure must be able to handle three-dimensional problems with general contact conditions and severe deformations; The latter condition necessitates automatic mesh-generation abilities. At the same time, the simulation tool must be economical acid user-friendly. In this paper, a solution procedure is introduced which is able to perform the numerical simulation of complex industrial metal forming processes without any interference. The procedure is based on the rigid-plastic finite element method and is primarily suited to the analysis of bulk metal-forming processes. To ensure a real automatic simulation, the numerical procedure is made robust by using Euler time integration, a Newton-Raphson solver which is coupled with a direct iteration solver, a linear contact algorithm and, finally, a completely automatic hexahedral mesh generation scheme. The method is implemented in the ANSI-C programming language. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method an industrial application has been simulated: A spider produced from a cylindrical initial workpiece by cold radial-extrusion.