Abstract

In most of automobile body panel manufacturing, trimming process is generally performed before flanging. To find feasible trimming line is crucial in obtaining accurate edge profile after flanging. Section-based method develops blank along manually chosen section planes and find trimming line by generating loop of end points. This method suffers from inaccurate results of edge profile. On the other hand, simulation-based method can produce more accurate trimming line by iterative strategy. In this study, new fast simulation-based method to find feasible trimming line is proposed. Finite element inverse method is used to analyze the flanging process because final shape after flanging can be explicitly defined and most of strain paths are simple in flanging. In utilizing finite element inverse method, the main obstacle is the initial guess generation for general mesh. Robust initial guess generation method is developed to handle genera] mesh with very different size and undercut. The new method develops final triangular mesh incrementally onto the drawing tool surface. Also in order to remedy mesh distortion during development, energy minimization technique is utilized. Trimming line is extracted from the outer boundary after finite element inverse method simulation. This method has many advantages since trimming line can be obtained in the early design stage. The developed method is verified by shrink/stretch flange forming and successfully applied to the complex industrial applications such as door outer flanging process.

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