QUADRILATERAL FINITE-ELEMENT GENERATION AND MESH QUALITY-CONTROL FOR METAL-FORMING SIMULATION

An improved looping method for quadrilateral finite element generation , effective especially for automatic metal forming simulation, was pre sented in this paper. A new splitting criterion to improve the convent ional looping method, an artificial boundary scheme to reduce mesh tra nsition regions and an optimal nodal placement scheme to enhance local and global mesh quality were introduced in the standpoint of metal fo rming engineering. Various application examples were given, which show versatility and applicability of the presented approaches and the dev eloped mesh generator. Application examples including automatic comput er simulation of a forging process showed that the presented approache s are powerful for metal forming simulation. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Son s, Ltd.