Discrete ductile fracture modelling for the metal blanking process

 Design and realisation of a metal blanking process in current industrial practice are mainly based on empirical knowledge. For more sophisticated applications, involving high accuracy geometry specifications, or non-standard materials and product shapes, this empirical approach often fails. This paper presents a set of interrelated numerical techniques resulting in a finite element model of the metal blanking process, focusing on the prediction of the shape of the cut edge of a blanked product. The large, localised deformations are handled by an Operator Split Arbitrary Lagrange Euler (OS-ALE) method supplemented by full remeshing. Transport of the state variables between subsequent meshes for the OS-ALE and remeshing methods is accomplished by the Discontinous Galerkin (DG) method and an interpolation procedure, respectively. Ductile fracture is incorporated using a discrete cracking approach, which is shown to generate mesh independent results. Received 4 February 2000