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.
