Effect of Mesh Parameters in Finite Element Simulation of Single Point Incremental Sheet Forming Process

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of element size and adaptive re-meshing technique in numerical simulation of incremental sheet forming (ISF) process. In ISF a hemispherical headed tool moves along the specified trajectory to deform the sheet in to required shape. This tool path is generally very long and thus increases the computational time. Therefore, in this work adaptive re- meshing technique has been used to minimize the computational time without sacrificing the accuracy of the results. For this a varying wall angle conical frustum was simulated using shell elements with different element edge lengths and adaptive mesh. Effects of these mesh parameters on plastic strain, punch force and form accuracy of deformed geometry has been studied. The necessary simulations for this study are performed using explicit finite element code LS-DYNA.