Research And Development Of Integrated System For Simulation Of Sheet Forming Applied To Whole Process Of Product Design

Traditional CAE software must to be used with CAD software, so it leads to some problems such as data losing, inefficiency and so on. This is a bottleneck in the development of CAE. CAD/CAE integration is a means to break this bottleneck which has advantage of seamless integration and non-destructive data. CAD/CAE integration has become the development direction of CAE software in recent years.The current CAE software is developing toward the direction of convenience and fast. The pre-processing turns to more and more automated and intelligent, that will reduce the user's workload and improving the efficiency of the pre-processing. More than half of the time is needed to do the process setting in the pre-processing. In the process setting, we must set a large amount of data for process and always repeat the operation. These jobs can be done by the CAE system, and users only need to do some slight modification before submit. The template technology is customizable and reusable. We can use it in process definition. If we combine template technology with CAE system, the time we need to define process will be greatly reduced and the efficiency of pre-processing will be greatly improved.This Papers use the inverse approach and Incremental method Solver, which are developed by State Key Laboratory of Die & Mold in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, to develop the sheet metal forming Simulation and CAD/CAE integration system on the UG software platform for the first time in the world, which is called Fastamp–NX. Fastamp–NX is a whole process simulation system for the entire product development process. The system include four modules such as blank estimation, trimming line unfolding, physical drawbead generate and sheet metal forming simulation, which can be applied in the entire development cycle from product design, process planning, die design to virtual try out.The module of blank estimates and trimming line unfolding are based on the inverse approach. They can be used in the product design stage to predict the defects from the process of forming and flanging rapidly. With the help of the two modules, designers can discover the design flaws as early as possible and reduce the cost of modifications. Furthermore, they also can calculate blank outline, trimming line and do drawbead optimization.The paper shows the role of drawbead and analyses the advantages and disadvantages of equivalent drawbead and physical drawbead in the sheet metal forming simulation. The physical drawbead has disadvantages of creation and modification the drawbead model, but the simulation result is more accurate and closer to reality. Physical drawbead generate modules can make up the shortcomings of physical drawbead effectively. It can generate variable cross-section drawbead , and modified easily.The sheet metal forming simulation module uses the template technology, which has been widely used in other areas. The module can simulate the process of stamping and hydroforming and it can simulate the whole process, including drawing, forming, trimming, flanging and springback. We can define process easily by import process template, which can avoid a repeat operation. This module has an efficient project management system that we can open the simulation project quickly. In addition, the module has achieved drawing graph on the UG dialog box which make up the shortfall of the UI_Styler.