Rigid-Plastic Finite Element Simulation of Cold Forging and Sheet Metal Forming by Eulerian Meshing Method

Abstract

A computational technique of rigid-plastic finite element method by using the Eulerian meshing method was developed to deal with large deformation problem in metal forming by replacing the conventional way of applying complicated remeshing schemes when using the Lagrange’s elements. During metal forming process, a workpiece normally undergoes large deformation and causes severe distortion of elements in finite element analysis. The distorted element may lead to instability in numerical calculation and divergence of non-linear solution in finite element analysis. With Eulerian elements, the initial elements are generated to fix into a specified analytical region with particles implanted as markers to form the body of a workpiece. The particles are allowed to flow between the elements after each deformation step to show the deforming pattern of material. Four types of cold forging and sheet metal clinching were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the presented method. The proposed method is found to be effective by comparing the results on dimension of the final product, material flow behaviour and punch load versus stroke obtained from simulation and experiment.