1 - Modeling of metal forming: a review

Abstract

Metal forming is one of the important manufacturing processes. There are three types of metal forming processes: bulk metal forming, sheet metal forming, and sheet-bulk metal forming. Some popular metal forming processes are forging, rolling, wire drawing, extrusion, deep drawing, and bending. Engineers are interested in the estimation of forming load and product quality in metal forming. Various modeling techniques have been employed for this purpose, for example, slab method, slip line field method, visioplasticity, upper bound method, finite difference method, and finite element method. Among these, the finite element method is the most preferred method as it is capable of carrying out fairly realistic simulation of the process, although it is a computationally intensive method. Recently, a meshless method, molecular dynamics simulations, and soft computing methods have also got prominence. A realistic simulation requires a large number of material and process parameters as input, some of which may not be easily determinable; hence, researchers try to develop inverse modeling techniques for the online estimation of the necessary input parameters. This chapter summarizes the developments in the modeling of metal forming and highlights challenging issues along with providing directions for future research. Important tasks needing the immediate attention of researchers are reduction in computational time, consideration of microstructural aspects including surface integrity, and modeling of friction that plays a very significant role in microforming.