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A sheet metal forming simulation code has been developed, based on the explicit time integration scheme and Mindlin shell theory. It has been used for the analysis of a number of industrial parts. After recalling some modelling issues, this paper describes an industrial methodology based on the experience of those analyses. The aim of the methodology is to provide, at early design stage, information on the product formability with a workload and lead time adapted to the design delays. Concurrently 2D analyses, critical zones studies and coarse mesh global investigations can be used, with a flexible number of iterations, prior to full refined analyses of the forming process. The application of the methodology on several industrial examples is discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to present a quadrilateral shell element using 16 degrees of freedom (dof) (12 translations and four rotations) which makes a pair with Morley's triangle at 12 dof. This latter has been updated by Batoz who later proposed an extension to a quadrilateral (“DKQ16”) but only with special interpolation functions for an elastic behaviour of the material. Precisely, it is in order to release from this strong limitation that a completely different formulation is proposed here.

The development of this new quadrilateral called “DKS16” involves three stages. The first one starts from Morley's triangle updated by Batoz (“DKT12”) to derive a rotation‐free (RF) triangular element (“S3”). The second stage consists in generalising this triangle to a RF quadrilateral (“S4”). During the final leg, the S4 and DKT12 main features are combined to give the quadrilateral “DKS16”.

Other parameters being equal, the type of finite element chosen for the forming stage simulation has a great influence on further springback result even in software with automatic remeshing. Particularly, it is pointed out that the RF shell elements S3 and S4 as well as the triangle DKT12 are less sensitive to the mesh size than classical shell elements with six dof per node. But, even if some improvements of in‐plane shear have been proposed, stamping codes users are reluctant to use triangles. That is why this paper presents an attempt to extrapolate a quadrilateral (DKS16) from the triangle DKT12 via S3 and S4 elements formulation. Numerous examples showing convergence and accuracy are presented: irregular meshes, large displacement analyses and deep‐drawing simulations.

The triangular “S3” element is already implemented in RADIOSS^® software and its implementation – as well as the one of “DKT12” – is in progress in Pam‐Stamp, both as “user elements”. The next step will be the implementation of the quadrilateral “S4” (RF) and, maybe, the element “DKS16” since both are cheaper in terms of computation time and are found interesting for sheet forming.

It seems obvious that curvatures are more exactly captured in RF elements (when nodes slide on die radius) since they are imposed in terms of translations instead of traditional nodal rotations not managed by contact conditions. As the neighbours are involved, a drawback of these RF elements is their complex formulation in case of branching surfaces and/or abrupt variations in material behaviour and/or thickness. This is not the case for elements such as DKT12 or DKS16, good candidates to add to the (long) list of cheap shell elements for large scale computations typical of sheet metal forming.

This paper gives a review of the finite element techniques (FE) applied in the area of material processing. The latest trends in metal forming, non‐metal forming, powder metallurgy and composite material processing are briefly discussed. The range of applications of finite elements on these subjects is extremely wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore the aim of the paper is to give FE researchers/users only an encyclopaedic view of the different possibilities that exist today in the various fields mentioned above. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on finite element applications in material processing for 1994‐1996, where 1,370 references are listed. This bibliography is an updating of the paper written by Brannberg and Mackerle which has been published in Engineering Computations, Vol. 11 No. 5, 1994, pp. 413‐55.

Sheet metal forming is a process of shaping thin sheets of metal by applying pressure through male or female dies or both. In most of used sheet‐formating processes the metal is subjected to primarily tensile or compressive stresses or both. During the last three decades considerable advances have been made in the applications of numerical techniques, especially the finite element methods, to analyze physical phenomena in the field of structural, solid and fluid mechanics as well as to simulate various processes in engineering. These methods are useful because one can use them to find out facts or study the processes in a way that no other tool can accomplish. Finite element methods applied to sheet metal forming are the subjects of this paper. The reason for writing this bibliography is to save time for readers looking for information dealing with sheet metal forming, not having an access to large databases or willingness to spend own time with uncertain information retrieval. This paper is organized into two parts. In the first one, each topic is handled and current trends in the application of finite element techniques are briefly mentioned. The second part, an Appendix, lists papers published in the open literature. More than 900 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with subjects that were published in 1995‐2003 are listed.

Nowadays, simplified inverse or one step approaches for the sheet forming modeling are increasingly used in the automobile industry, since they allow to quickly realize the preliminary design and especially to optimize the process parameters. These methods often based on implicit static algorithms cause sometimes convergence problems because of strong non‐linearities. This paper deals with several initial guess methods to speed up the convergence of the implicit static solver used in the inverse approach for stamping modeling. The blank's mesh as initial solution is obtained by geometrical considerations based on the known shape of the final 3D workpiece. Three algorithms for the estimation of the blank's mesh have been developed and compared. The application to several industrial problems shows their efficiency and performance.