Abstract
In the finite element analysis of forming process, objects are described with a finite number of elements and nodes and the approximated solutions can be obtained by the variational principle. One of the shortcomings of a finite element analysis is that the structure of mesh has become inefficient and unusable because discretization error increases as deformation proceeds due to severe distortion of elements. If the state of current mesh satisfies a certain remeshing criterion, analysis is stopped instantly and resumed with a reconstructed mesh. In the study, a new remeshing algorithm using tetrahedral elements has been developed, which is adapted to the desired mesh density. In order to reduce the discretization error, desired mesh sizes in each lesion of the workpiece are calculated using the Zinkiewicz and Zhu's a-posteriori error estimation scheme. The pre-constructed mesh is constructed based on the modified point insertion technique which is adapted to the density function. The object domain is divided into uniformly-sized sub-domains and the numbers of nodes in each sub-domain are redistributed, respectively. After finishing the redistribution process of nodes, a tetrahedral mesh is reconstructed with the redistributed nodes, which is adapted to the density map and resulting in good mesh quality. A goodness and adaptability of the constructed mesh is verified with a testing measure. The proposed remeshing technique is applied to the finite element analyses of forging processes.
