A PARAMETRIC AND USERFRIENDLY APPROACH TO INCREMENTAL PROCESS SIMULATION OF SHEET METAL FORMING

With a steady increase in computational power and decrease in hardware costs during the last few years, the incremental process simulation in the area of sheet metal forming is considered a state-of- the-art tool during the development process at OEMs and many, mainly larger, suppliers. However, the existing pre-processing tools do not support a template based analysis setup that can prevent the need for highly skilled personnel in order to set-up an analysis application and, therefore; open the door for an LS-DYNA based stamping simulation for smaller companies that do not have the skill set and manpower available to do the analysis setup using existing tools. The presented solution FormingSuite FastIncremental, is an analysis environment that provides the end user with a dramatically simplified solution for the setup process for incremental stamping analysis using the LS-DYNA solver. This is done through the automation of tool definition/extraction and an automated setup for blank on curved binder combined with other techniques to enable fast solving time. To ensure an optimized solution time, a combination of inverse and incremental finite element tools is used. This combination can lead to enormous time savings in blank development and positioning, tool definition, binder wrap calculation as well as in simulation run-time while reliable results are produced. The user interface is CAD-like and geared towards an average industry practitioner; definition of complete forming processes as well as the application of boundary conditions is mapped on the first form geometry as it is commonly used on A-layouts in the industry. Associative and regenerative mechanisms ensure that changes made to the first form geometry or to forming conditions are automatically propagated throughout the complete analysis process, ensuring that geometry, forming conditions and results are always in sync. This also means that in conjunction with an automated tool generation, the presented tool enables an automated batch mode processing for pre-defined part groups without any user interaction other than evaluating the calculated results.