On the performance of substructuring implicit simulation of single point incremental forming

Abstract

This paper investigates the computational performance of the direct substructuring method. Substructuring is used to reduce the computing time in the implicit simulation of single point incremental forming (SPIF). Substructuring divides the finite element (FE) mesh into several non-overlapped substructures. The substructures are categorized into two groups: the plastic–nonlinear–substructures and the elastic–pseudo-linear–substructures. The plastic substructures assemble a part of the FE mesh that is in contact with the forming tool; they are treated by the fully nonlinear method. The elastic substructures model the elastic deformation of the rest of the FE mesh. Two approaches are used to treat the elastic substructures: the linearized approach and the condensed linearized approach. In both approaches, the geometrical and the material behaviour are assumed linear within the increment. The geometrical and material nonlinearity are considered after convergence. Combined with the plastic substructures treatment, the approaches are refered to as the plastic linear elastic (PLE) approach and the plastic condensed linear elastic approach (PCLE). The substructures categorization in plastic and elastic substructures is adapted during the simulation to capture the tool motion. Different sizes for the substructures are considered. In an example of 1600 shell elements, the best results achieved by the PLE speeding–up the classical implicit simulation by 2.82 times.