New approach to the generation of orthogonal body-fitted meshes and its application to non-steady plane-strain ideal plastic flow

Abstract

For rigid-perfect plastic solids, ideal plastic flow happens when all material elements follow minimum work paths and the two principal stretch lines are materially embedded. To describe its kinematics effectively, Lagrange convective orthogonal curvilinear system has to be constructed. Therefore, a numerical procedure for generating orthogonal body-fitted meshes has been developed and applied to non-steady plane-strain ideal plastic flow. The mapping between the Cartesian system and the orthogonal system is based on Laplace equations and Cauchy–Riemann condition. The numerical procedure takes into consideration of all the prescribed boundary curves instead of one as the boundary conditions, which has been adopted in earlier studies when using conventional characteristic line method. After each iteration step, the obtained boundary points are adjusted towards the orthogonality conditions until error tolerance requirement is met. For demonstration purpose, the numerical procedure is applied to the optimization of a bulk part under forging. The obtained orthogonal body-fitted meshes are in good agreement with previous methods. Then the optimal initial scale factor is also calculated based on this method and compared with earlier studies. Finally, the evolution of the intermediate shapes and frictional external boundary conditions is also calculated when there are no elastic dead zones.