Metal forming analysis using the edge-based smoothed finite element method

This paper presents an edge-based gradient smoothing technique for the simulation of metal forming processes. In presented method, the work pieces are first discretized into a set of triangular cells, and edge-based smoothing domains are further formed associated with the cell edges. The strain field is smoothed using the gradient smoothing technique over each smoothing domain, which is used for performing the numerical integration. In the total Lagrangian formulation, the gradient smoothing technique is performed for the deformation gradient. The smoothed deformation gradient is derived at the reference (or initial) configuration. The integration domains are different from the interpolation domain, and the method can work for extremely distorted meshes. A simple but general contact searching algorithm is used to treat the contact interface and an algorithm for the contact force is presented. Some examples with large material distortions are given to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.