3D Thermo-Mechanical Simulation Coupled with Adaptive Remeshing for Metal Milling

Abstract

As a material removal process, metal milling process involves large geometry deformation, material thermo-visco-plastic flow coupled with damage and complex contact-friction problems. During simulation of metal milling, the finite elements distort severely at the local regions with high gradient of physical field such as stress, strain and temperature due to these problems. This paper presents numerical adaptive remeshing procedure dedicated to metal milling process. The procedure integrates Explicit solver of ABAQUS, OPTIFORM mesher and python script program transfer to execute step by step the incremental milling process. At each step, the meshes are refined and coarsened automatically based on geometrical and physical error estimations; the physical fields are transferred (point to point) from old to the new one using advanced algorithm. Johnson-cook material model is used to simulate the material plastic flow with ductile damage. Some numerical results are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed procedure.