Finite Element Simulation Of Sheet Metal Deep Drawing Process

The sheet metal parts have been widely used in the automobile, aerospace and electronics industries owing to their light weight, great interchangeability, good surface finish and low cost. The deep drawing process is a main practice for mass production of sheet metal parts. The physical phenomena in deep drawing process are very complicated, including three nonlinear problems (material, geometry and boundary) of the mechanics science. The development of tooling for the sheet metal deep drawing is a time-consuming and expensive "trial and error" process by traditional way. In this paper finite element (FE) modeling is adopted to analyze this process in order to reduce the time and cost of tooling development.A finite element model has been used to analyze the sheet metal deep drawing process by the FE software, MSC.Marc. The underlying formulation is based on static implicit method and updated Lagrangian method. The tools are modeled as rigid surfaces. The blank is modeled as a deformable body. The interaction of sliding surfaces is modeled with a Coulomb friction law. The results are summarized as follows.1. Numerical simulation of deep drawing process of Zn-22Al in U shape is presented by isotropic rigid-plastic FEM. Von. Mises stress, plastic strain, contact friction force, thickness distribution and external force on dies during forming process are analyzed.2. Isotropic elastoplastic model is used in washing tank forming process of DAYANG Stainless Steel Corporation. Von. Mises stress, plastic strain, contact friction force and thickness distribution during forming process are analyzed. The wrinkle region is forecasted. The simulation results are validated by the experiments.3. Normal anisotropic material behavior is considered in oil pan forming process. The experiments of oil pan deep drawing process are made in Dalian Innovation Parts Manufacturing Company. Sensitive studies of the effects of the element types, friction coefficients, hardening models, mesh types are conducted because these parameters have a great effect on the simulation results. The simulation results are validated by sectional analysis in comparison with the thickness distributions of A type oil pan. The optimum model derived from FEM analysis provides a relatively accurate solution, that is taking 4-node shell element, adaptive mesh technology, v =0.1 and isotropic hardening. It also has advantage of not requiring excessive computation time. The failure cause of initial design of oil pan of A type is analyzed by the model, oil pan of B type is analyzed by the optimum model. The structure of blank is optimized, and the drawing breakage is simulated. The easily breakable region is got, and the simulation result is validated by the experiment.4. The plane strain model is used in vibration damping sheets forming process. The shear defect during deep drawing process is studied by the finite element simulation.