Adaptive remeshing for incremental forming simulation

Incremental forming of aluminium sheets has been modelled by finite element simulations.
However the computation time was prohibitive because the tool deforms every part of the sheet and the mesh along the tool path must be very fine. Therefore, an adaptive remeshing method has been developed. The elements that are close to the tool are divided into smaller elements in order to have a fine mesh where high deformations occur. Consequently, some new nodes become inconsistent with the non-refined neighbouring elements. To overcome that problem, their displacements are constrained, i.e. dependent on their master nodes displacements. The data concerning these new nodes and elements are stored in a linked list, which is a fundamental data structure. It consists of a sequence of cells, each containing data fields and a pointer towards the next cell. The goal of this article is to explain the developments performed in the finite element code, to validate the adaptive remeshing technique and to measure its efficiency using the line test simulation. During this test, which is a simple incremental forming test, a clamped sheet is deformed by a spherical tool moving along a linear path.