In this blog we'll simulate a sheet metal forming process called deep drawing, with SIMULIA Abaqus Software. It can be challenging to design a deep drawing product and the tools to create it, because many potential issues are not observed until the first prototype is produced. Simulations can help determine whether a design suffices, without actually having to create costly tools or do time consuming tests. Multiple design iterations can easily be investigated.

As you may have noticed, we're working on kind of a series of blogs on the simulation of different production techniques. This time, we will look at roll forming.

Roll forming

During the roll forming process, a long strip of sheet metal is continuously bent into the desired cross-section. The strip passes through a number of sets of rollers, where each set performs a part of the total desired bend, until the final profile is obtained.

When producing a part, you want it to match the design, the geometry. How to achieve this is not always evident.

For example, when the part is created from sheet metal by pressing it between an upper and lower die, the final part may not fully match the space in between the dies due to the spring back effect. If the deformation would be fully plastic, then the deformed shape will not change during unloading. If it is partially elastic, then the elastic deformation is recovered upon unloading and hence the final shape differs from the shape between the dies. In this blog I’ll give an example of this effect, showing that we can model it with Abaqus.

In this month’s webinar we will be covering residual stress and springback. We will look at their definition and implications on FEA, how to deal with springback efficiently in Abaqus and the transfer of residual stresses and deformed parts between Abaqus steps and solvers.

Often the forming of metallic parts involves large quasi-static deformations and multiple sources of non-linearity. Processes such as these are regularly analysed using Abaqus/Explicit. This has implications when the aim is to model the forming process and determine the final deformed shape of a component.