A General Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian Formulation for the Numerical Simulation of 3D forming Processes

In this paper, the arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian formalism is used to compute the steady state of a 2D metal cutting operation and a 3D U-shaped cold roll forming process. Compared to the Lagrangian case, this method allows the use of a refined mesh near the tools, leading to an accurate representation of the chip formation (metal cutting) and the bending of the sheet (roll forming) with a limited computational time. The main problem of this kind of simulation is the rezoning of the nodes on the free surfaces of the sheet. A modified iterative isoparametric smoother is used to manage this geometrically complex and CPU expensive task. c 2007 American Institute of Physics.