Numerical modelling and simulation of sheet metal cutting processes

Material processing is a very important industrial sector. In order to guarantee high precision and quality of the products, reliable numerical simulation models are required. This contribution concerns the simulation of material cutting. As a benchmark example, a sheet metal is fixed by two clamping tools and the cutting process is controlled by a moving blade. The tools are modelled as linear elastic materials, and the sheet metal as elasto-plastic material with hardening. Main scope is the comparison of two simulation methods with respect to industrial application: (i) Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian Finite Element Method and (ii) Coupled Lagrangian Finite Element and Smoothed Particle Analysis. Numerical simulation models for the two variants of the above benchmark example are implemented in the commercial code Abaqus. The numerical results of the two models are compared with respect to accuracy and numerical effort, and the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods are investigated. The implemented models for the cutting process and the materials can be applied to several other kinds of industrial material processing like stamping or punching.