Model material technique, which requires only the small space of experimental set-up and low cost for experiment, is used to estimate the deformed profile and the forging load in rotary forging. The materials and working conditions are determined to satisfy the similitude conditions between the model test and the prototype test. The model material of the so-called plasticine and the mild steel are chosen as specimens, and they represent almost the same value of strain gardening exponent in the stress-strain relationship. Lubricant in the model test is also carefully selected so that it gives the same frictional conditions at the tool-specimen interface. Experiments for two kinds of specimens are carried out in each testing equipment at room temperatue. From the experiments the deformed dimensions and the forging loads are measured and compared with each other by using the simulation coefficients. It is shown that there are good agreements between the model test and the prototype test. Finally, for verifying the availability of the model material technique this mathod is applied to forging of bevel gear product. the good result is obained which can demonstrate that the model material technique is very efficent for estimating or developing a new process.

The tact switch is widely used in electric and electronic products. The dome type tact spring is produced by stamping. Stamping of the tact spring and operation of the tact switch have been simulated by the elasto-plastic finite element method. The operating characteristics of the switch may be given by the relation between the operating force and stroke. For a given material, this is affected by two main factors. One is the geometry of dome spring which is determined by the geometry of stamping dies and the stamping pressure, and another one is the dimension of switch. From the calculation, it was possible to obtain the stamping conditions and switch dimension for a predetermined force-stroki relation And, the hoop stresses and effective strains distributions due to the stamping and during the operation of the switch indicate a possibility of cracking in the center and rim of dome spring.

An integrated process planning system can determine desirable operation sequences even if they have little experience in the design of multistage cold forging process. This system is composed of seven major modules such as input module, pre-design module, formability check module, forming sequence design module, forming analysis module, FEM verification module, and output module which are used independently or in all. The forming sequence for the part can be determined by means of primitive geometries such as cylinder, cone, convex, and concave. By utilizing this geometrical characteristics(diameter, height, and radius), the part geometry is expressed by a list of the primitive geometries. Accordingly, the forming sequence design is formulated as the search problem which starts with a billet geometry and finishes with a given product one. Using the developed system, the sequence drawing with all dimensions, which includes the dimensional tolerances and the proper sequence of operations for parts, is generated under the environment of AutoCAD. Several forming sequences generated by the planning system can be checked by the forming analysis module. The acceptable forming sequences can be verified further, using FE simulation.

The compression molding of SMC (sheet molding compund) at room temperature was analyzed based on rigid-viscoplastic approach by three dimensional finite element program. The developed program was tested by solving the three dimensional compression of wedge type specimens of aluminum alloys at various processing conditions. The simulation results were compared well to the experimental results available in the literature. based on this comparison the program was proved to be valid and was further applied in solving compression molding of SMC, which is a thermosetting material reinforced with chopped fiber glass. To investigate the effects of friction conditions and mold closing speeds for compression molding of SMC charge at room temperature, compressions of the cylindrical and rectangular shaped SMC were analyzed for various friction conditions and mold closing speeds. The calculated load values were compared to the experimental results for the compression molding of cylindrical specimen.

In this study, a contact algorithm for the finite element analysis of free surface contact problem in materials forming is presented. The proposed contact algorithm consists of two parts. The first is the contact searching part, and the second, the constraint part. The contact searching algorithm does not require any a priori knowledge of the pairs of contact nodes or segments and the impenetrability constraint is satisfied using the penalty function scheme. void colsure in open-die forging was simulated to verify the accuracy and capability of the currently developed contact algorithm. The simulation results, obtained from ABAQUS simulation, were compared well to the experimental data available in the literature.

A simple kinematically admissible velocity field is proposed to determine the final-stage extrusion load and the average extruded length in the square-die forward extrusion of regular polygonal-shaped bars from circular billets. From the proposed velocity field, the upper-bound extrusion load and the average extruded length are determined by minimizing the total power consumption with respect to four parameters. Experiments have been carried out with hard solder billets at room temperature. The theoretical predictions of the extrusion load are in good agreements with the experimental results and there is generally reason able agreement in average extruded length between theory and experiment.

The arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian(ALE) finite element analysis is applied to the axisymmetric hot extrusion through continuous dies. In order to simulate hot forming problems, an ALE scheme for temperature analysis is proposed. The computed results are compared with experimental results as with those by pure Lagrangian method. In the present study mesh control is accomplished by the use of isoparametric mapping of quadrilaterals.

Precision forming of electronic components has appeared to be competitive according to manufacturing cost and dimensional tolerances. Now domestic electronic companies have been involving in utilization of the finite element method in process design of precision forming. A forming process to produce an electronic component, aperture, has been inbestigated to find out forming defects during multi-operations. The applications of the commercial FEM software MARC show a possibility of defect in precision coining process among the whole multi-process. Thus the coining process of three-dimensional deformation is analyzed using DAMF-3D which has been developed in this lab with the rigid-plastic algorithm. The result f simulations by DAMF-3D provides clear description of the defect involved in the coining process.

It often happens some elements are so largely distorted during a large-deformation finite element analysis that further calculation becomes impossible or the approximation error increases rapidly. This problem can be overcomed only by remeshing at several suitable stages. The present study aimed to establish the criterion based on the error estimators, and examined in the simulation and posterior error analysis of ring compression test to demonstrate the usefulness of them. The distribution of each error estimator and its variation during deformation were investigated. All the error estimators were increased monotonously with deformation and decreased rapidly at remeshing stage. It was shown that the error estimators suggested in this study are good measures as remeshing criterion for large deformation finite element analyses.