Acceleration of sheet metal spinning simulation by multi-mesh method

Sheet metal spinning is an incremental forming process for producing axisymmetric thin-walled parts through continuous local deformation under the action of rollers. While studying the spinning process by finite element (FE) method, a critical bottleneck is the enormous simulation time. For beating off this challenge, a novel multi-mesh method is developed. The method can dynamically track the movement of rollers and adaptively refine the mesh. Thus, a locally refined quadrilateral computation mesh can be generated in the locally-deforming zone and reduce the unnecessary fine elements outside the locally-deforming zone. In the multi-mesh system, the fine elements and coarse elements are extracted from a storage mesh and a background mesh, respectively. Meanwhile, the hanging nodes in the locally refined mesh are removed by designing 4-refinement templates. Between computation mesh and storage mesh, a bi-cubic parametric surface fitting algorithm and accurate remapping methods are conducted to transmit geometric information and physical fields. The proposed method has been verified by two spinning processes. The results suggest that the method can save time by up to about 67% with satisfactory accuracy, especially for distributions of thickness and strain compared with the fully refined mesh.