Sheet metal forming using adaptive resmeshing

Problems associated with finite element simulation of the forming processes are characterized by large elastoplastic deformations, evolutive contact with friction, geometrical non linearities inducing a severe distortion of the computational mesh of the domain. Frequent remeshing of the deformed domain during computation is necessary to obtain an accurate solution and complete the computation until the termination of the numerical simulation process. This paper presents a new adaptive remeshing method of thin sheets for numerical simulation of metal forming processes in three dimensions. The proposed remeshing technique includes adaptive refinement and coarsening procedures. It has been implemented with triangular and quadrilateral elements. The method is based on geometrical criteria and does not use the geometry of the forming tools. It is integrated in a computational environment using the ABAQUS solver. Numerical examples are given to show the efficiency of the proposed approach.