Dramatic Speed-Up in FEM Simulations of Various Incremental Forming Processes Thanks to Multi-Mesh Implementation in Forge®

Abstract

Improvements in parallel computing and adaptive remeshing have permitted to simulate a wide range of metal forming processes within few hours or days on modern multi-core workstations. However, they do not tackle the issues encountered in incremental forming processes, making them very challenging. Multi-mesh methods opens very interesting doors in this domain, making possible to take advantage of adaptive remeshing techniques (optimizing the ratio precision/cost) without its usual drawbacks (loss of information and diffusion issues).We present in this article a fully parallel Dual-Mesh implementation in the commercial FEA software FORGE®, compatible with a wide range of other FEM facilities. Speed-up larger than 4 are common for incremental forming simulations, and speed-up larger than 10 can be reached in favorable cases. Parallel efficiency is the same than for our standard computations (>80% for more than 2000 nodes per core).