APPLICATION OF THE FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD TO THE SIMULATION OF SHEET FORMING PROCESSES - COMPARISON OF CALCULATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS

Elastic-plastic finite element calculations have been carried out to analyse sheet forming processes such as hydrostatic bulging of circular and rectangular blanks and the axisymmetric stretching of sheets (with different punch radii). The results, partly obtained by different finite element models, are compared with experimental data. It could be shown that, regarding the examples considered, experiments and calculations fit well and that a more sophisticated modelling of the contact boundary conditions improves the accuracy of the results. As a first attempt to handle more complex sheet forming operations, the deep drawing of a rectangular cup has been analysed. A summary of the theoretical background as well as some comments on the solution method and the implementation are given.