Fully automatic simulation of bulk metal forming processes

The paper presents a fully automatic finite element procedure for the simulation of industrial bulk metal forming processes. The procedure is based on a rigid (-quasi-viscous) plastic material law. Thermomechanical analyses are performed by loose or full coupling of the heat balance and the equilibrium equations. To ensure a real automatic simulation, the numerical procedure is made robust by using Euler time integration, a Newton-Raphson solver which is coupled with a direct iteration solver, a linear contact algorithm and, finally, a completely automatic hexahedral mesh generation scheme. Severe deformations are detected automatically and are handled by mesh smoothing and/or by remeshing. The all-hexahedral-mesh generation is based on a modified octree scheme. The method is implemented in the ANSI-C programming language. Effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by an industrial application.