One of my FavoriteSimulation is metal forming process, specifically bending pipe process.
Setting up this kind of models could be tedius, overall if the pipe has a lot of bents. In addition, to create and to orient the tooling could be a heavy task. For that, I've created a plug-in with python to automatize this set up.
Different bending methods are implemented and the models are completely parameterized. Only the user need to define some parameters to create the complete model, and the default values are set according with experience and tipical values (create the model takes up less than 5 min. No matter how many bents!!).
The work flow is divided in 6 steps:
1-Define the pipe routing: Just introduce the bending points and bent radius or load a file. You can choose if transform the data into the global coordinate system.
2-Define the tube cross section (Diameter and thickness) and select the bent method:
- Classical bending
- Compression bending
- Roll bending
- Press bending
- Stretch bending
- One step (at the moment it only creates two meshes, deformed and undeformed, and renumber the nodes and elements to have the same id between meshes and to be able to calculate the initial configuration and Stress and strains in one step).
3- Create the tube. In this step you can define the material, if you want to consider welding seam and HAZ, and material orientation
4- Create the tooling. In this step you can modify any geometric parameter and basic mesh parameters to obtain finer o corase mesh.
5- Create the simulations models. The previous steps create a Base Model which has all the parts involved in the bending simulation. Simulation models are models for each stage during the bending. For example, closing of the tooling, bending, feeding and springback.
This step is used to select which parts the user want to consider for the analysis, created by previous steps or if you have your own parts. Also, here the user define the BC, Loads, setp setup (i.e. mass scaling, times, ...), Contact. It's a fast way, in an unique window, to define all the simulation models.
6- Launch the simulation models. Once you have created the simulations models, the plugin recognize them and they are shown into a table. Here you can define the global properties for each job, and if you want only create the jobs and inp files.
In the visualization module, there will be as many odb files as simulation models launched. So that, in order to have an unique animation for the complete bending process, I developed an additional plugin to join all the animations that the user select in the table.
You can see how the plugin works in the link:
https://youtu.be/06r4SsHmRDQ
Now bending pipe simulations are easier than ever with Abaqus.
