Elastic-plastic finite element analysis of automotive body panel stamping processes using dynamic explicit time integration scheme

Abstract

In this article, the elastic-plastic finite element formulations using dynamic explicit time-integration schemes are proposed for numerical analysis of automotive body panel stamping processes. A general formulation of finite element simulation for complex sheet forming processes with arbitrarily shaped tools is briefly introduced. In finite element simulation of automotive body panel stamping processes, the robustness and stability of computation are important requirements since the computation time and convergency become major points of consideration besides the solution accuracy due to the complexity of geometry and boundary conditions. For analyses of more complex cases with larger and more refined meshes, the explicit method is more time effective than the implicit method, and it has no convergency problem and has the robust nature of contact and friction algorithms, although the implicit method is widely used because of excellent accuracy and reliability. The elastic-plastic scheme is more reliable and rigorous, while the rigid-plastic scheme requires short computation time. The performance of the dynamic explicit algorithms is investigated by comparing the simulation results of forming of complex-shaped automotive body parts, such as a fuel tank and a rear hinge, with the experimental results. It has been shown that dynamic explicit schemes provide quite similar results to the experimental results. It is thus shown that the proposed dynamic explicit elastic-plastic finite element method enables an effective computation for complicated automotive body panel stamping processes.