I would like to know whether simulating the deep drawing of a sheet metal piece is possible with FreeCAD FEM.
The answers I seek are whether the sheet metal forming would result in shearing failure for being to aggressive – as opposed to a multi-staged progressive process – and also allow for the fine tuning of the die and mold dimensions in order to compensate for spring back and achieve the desired final geometry.
This is my first post, and although I’ve searched the forum I haven’t found any result regarding this specific issue, whether for a lack of searching skills or not . I apologize for any misconduct.
Such simulations are usually performed as quasi-static in explicit dynamics solver. This is not supported by FreeCAD but standalone CalculiX allows for analyses like that and this might be the best option for you.
Thank you for suggesting standalone CalculiX. I’ll be studying the documentation.
Thanks!!
Edit: Unfortunately CalculiX doesn’t seem to be user friendly. And the only GUI that I found (PrePoMax) can only be compiled for Windows.
Edit 2: I found a very powerful tool called Salome Meca by Code Aster and it does exactly what I want and more. It’s also FOSS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4pckqQGvHo
Thank you all. I hope that someone finds this thread on Google and Salome Meca helps them as much as I hope it’ll help me.
Would be cool if you could come back in a few days, weeks, month and give some feedback. …
@others:
what is the difference on such an analysis compared to a simple stress analysis? What will be calculated on such an analysis. Since I am structural concrete engineer I have no idea … Is it not “just” a huge constraint displacement?
Both CalculiX and Code_Aster should handle that. CalculiX has much more user friendly syntax (Code_Aster uses solver commands in french while CalculiX has nice and clear keywords based on those known from Abaqus). However, Code_Aster is more powerful and you can do a lot with Salome_Meca as preprocessor (unless you don’t mind really steep learning curve and very non-intuitive workflow).
Explicit dynamics analyses solve complete dynamic equilibrium equations using explicit time integration. They are the best choice for high speed and largely nonlinear events (such as crash tests) but can also be used for quasi-static simulations where inertia effects may be ignored. Explicit solvers can handle difficult contact conditions and other nonlinearities with ease and you don’t have to worry about concergence anymore. The only problem is potentially large computational time when small elements are used (due to stable time increment thing) or long time period is simulated. But in quasi-static analyses this can be easily omitted by using mass scaling or speeding up the loading artificially. Of course both tricks have to be dobe carefully or inertia effects will become significant and the solution won’t be quasi-static anymore.
. I apologize for any misconduct.
