Numerical simulation of wheel forming process including damage and thermal effects

Abstract : Ductile (or plastic) damage often occurs during some metal forming processes caused by large plastic flow localisation. Accordingly, it is primordial for numerical tools used to simulate these processes to use fully coupled constitutive equations accounting for both isotropic and kinematics hardening and damage. In this work, fully coupled constitutive equations accounting for both combined isotropic and kinematic hardening with thermal effects as well as the ductile damage are used with the general purpose Finite Element code ABAQUS. First, the fully coupled constitutive equations in the framework of Continuum Damage Mechanics are presented. The associated numerical aspects are then presented using an implicit integration scheme for local time integration of the fully coupled constitutive equations and a dynamic explicit scheme to solve the associated initial and boundary value problem. This numerical approach is applied to the virtual forming of an axisymmetric wheel made in commercial steel. Starting from a cylindrical billet, the wheel is forged using rigid tools. The central hole of the billet is obtained with blanking operation. Finally the deburring operation is used to cut off the burr resulting from the forging operation. Both the temperature and the damage fields are carefully analysed for each forming stage.