Rigid-plastic analysis for metal forming processes using a reproducing kernel particle method

This paper presents a rigid-plastic metal forming simulation using a meshfree method. With the use of a meshfree method, the domain of the workpiece is discretized by a set of particles without using structured meshes. This approach avoids mesh distortion difficulties which may occur during the course of large plastic deformation. The proposed method can be used in solving metal forming problems in which the elastic part of the strain is not important and can be neglected without a serious loss of accuracy. Since the rigid-plastic model is fast and numerically robust, the proposed method can be a good alternative to the elasto-plastic meshfree methods for metal forming problems. Numerical examples are presented to show the feasibility of the proposed method. A comparative study is also conducted to demonstrate consistency of the results from elasto-plastic and rigid-plastic simulations for a metal forming application.