A BOUNDARY ELEMENT FORMULATION FOR SHEET-METAL FORMING

A boundary element method (BEM) for the analysis of metal-forming processes is presented. THis BEM formulation incorporates both material and geomeric nonlinearities and admits general follower force boundary conditions. It is capable of using any of a class of combined creep-plasticity constitutive models with state variables for the description of material behavior. The specific problems considered are in-plane stretching of an ASTM-E8 tensile specimen and plane train bulging of sheet metals using the material model originally proposed by Hart. The computer program developed here can also be applied to study other plane strain metal forming processes.