3-D FINITE-ELEMENT MODELING OF THE FORGING PROCESS WITH AUTOMATIC REMESHING

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the interest of using a finite element program to simulate the forging process of industrial parts. The FORGE3 code, which can simulate hot forging of industrial parts, is presented: thermo-mechanical formulation, numerical resolution. It is well known that, in an updated lagrangian approach using a convective mesh, the degeneracy of the mesh occurs very rapidly and stops the simulation. An automatic mesh generation procedure for 3-D complex geometries has been developed with which it is possible to create the initial mesh of the billet as well as to remesh it after its degeneracy. This technique enables to simulate the whole forging process of complex industrial parts using quadratic tetrahedra. In order to show the effectiveness of the method, the example of the forging of a tripod has been computed. The simulation results show that the computation can be carried out using the described remeshing procedure and that it can be applied with success to even more complex geometries.