Section: New Results

Advanced meshing and remeshing procedure for mechanical and numerical simulations

Participants : Abel Cherouat [correspondant] , Houman Borouchaki, Paul-Louis George, Patrick Laug, Zhu Aichun, Jie Zhang, Faouzi Slimani, Guillaume Dufaye.

Most metal forming parts involve complex geometry and flow characteristics as large (visco)-plasticity flow, heat exchange, ductile damage, evolving contact with friction. An intrinsic difficulty in metal forming process is the constantly changing configuration of the deforming part (finite transformation, thermo-plastic flow). In metal forming, the mesh size should be adapted to the curvature of complex tools in order to optimize the contact boundaries and the damaged zones. These problems can be resolved if an adaptive remeshing scheme is incorporated automatically in the finite element analysis. It is necessary to adapt the mesh in order to improve the geometry of the deformed part and the damage localization. To mesh the 3D computational domain, we apply a new optimization approach which uses a combined Delaunay-frontal method to define field points and to construct the connection between these points or with a given prescribed size map (error estimate). The first objective of this project is to develop a 3D advanced remeshing procedure (error estimation, field transfer, optimisation meshing) for metal forming. The second objective is to integrate in a computational environment the mechanical model, 3D reconstruction from images, reliability-optimisation and the remeshing procedure using the ABAQUS/Explicit solver and the adaptive mesher. Application is dedicated to some examples (side pressing, blanking and orthogonal cutting, 3D guillotining, thermo-hydroforming and forging) for metal forming and breast and porous metal foam material reconstitution.