Fast simulation of incremental sheet metal forming by adaptive remeshing and subcycling

In order to use incremental sheet forming (ISF) in an industrial context, it is necessary to provide fast and accurate simulation methods for virtual process design. Without reliable process simulations, first-time right production seams infeasible and the process loses its advantage of offering a short lead time. Previous work indicates that implicit finite element (FE) methods are at present not efficient enough to allow for the simulation of AISF for industrially relevant parts, mostly due to the fact that the moving contact requires a very small time step. Finite element methods based on explicit time integration can be sped up using mass or time scaling to enable the simulation of large-scale sheet metal forming problems. However, AISF still requires dedicated adaptive meshing methods to further reduce the calculation times. In this paper, an adaptive remeshing strategy based on a multi-mesh method is developed and applied to the simulation of AISF. It is combined with subcycling to further reduce the calculation times. For the forming of a cone shape, it is shown that savings in CPU time of up to 80 % are possible with acceptable loss of accuracy, and that the simulation time scales more moderately when the part size is increased, so that larger, industrially relevant parts become feasible.