Simulations in Sheet Metal Forming Industry for the 21st Century

Abstract

High petroleum cost nowadays and expectedly in the future is a major force driving the cost up in every industrial sector. In metal forming industry, tooling design is a very important and costly process in the design and development phase. By a traditional means, trial-and-error approach requires continuous corrections causing many problems to manufacturers since tooling corrections and real scale experiments are very costly and inefficient consumption of limited natural resources. As a result, simulations via computer models play an important role in the present time. An important tool to this problem solving in the sheet metal forming industry is a nonlinear finite element method. When it works together with proper material models, it has potential and is suitable for applications in the current 21st century to efficiently analyze and design manufacturing processes, especially in sheet metal forming.