Three-dimensional finite element simulation of a spider hot forging process using a new remeshing scheme

Abstract A new method of three-dimensional remeshing is proposed for thermo-viscoplastic finite element analysis of complicated forging shapes. In the method, the deformed body to be remeshed is divided into a surface-adaptive layer and a core region. At the surface layer of hexahedral elements, the arrangement of nodal points is made by normal projection of boundary nodes in order to retard the mesh degeneracy, since the arrangement of boundary nodes can be achieved easily using the die surface patch information. After generating the mesh automatically at the surface-adaptive layer, the core region is meshed automatically by introducing a body-fitted mapping technique. In order to show the effectiveness of the method in a three-dimensional problem, forging of a spider has been simulated as a practical example. The complete simulation of spider forging has been carried out using the thermo-viscoplastic finite element method and the remeshing scheme. The deformed patterns of the computation are in good agreement with the results of experimens using the plasticine. It is thus shown that the proposed method can be applied successfully to complex geometries.