Towards a General Quality Indicator for Adaptive FEM Simulation of Sheet Forming Processes

Abstract

The concept of adaptive loading by FEM simulation (briefly referred to as Adaptive Simulation, AS) has been recently introduced. The AS method adaptively adjusts the loading paths as the simulation proceeds, reacting to the instantaneous results of the simulation itself, i.e. by monitoring the values of one or more state variables. A state variable is an indicator of the quality of the part undergoing the deformation. The formulation of state variables should be independent on the specific forming process. In this paper, a general quality indicator is proposed, which can be used as a state variable for the AS of different sheet metal forming processes. The paper includes two main sections. The first presents a brief review on possible state variables suitable for the AS and provides a justification of the proposed state variable. In the second section, the proposed approach is described and evaluated with two numerical examples.