Numerical Methods for Simulating the Metal Shearing Process : A Novel Numerical Model for the Punching of Metals

Abstract: When dealing with the separation of materials, the metal shearing process such as punching, is widely used in theindustry due to its time efficient manner. There is however, a need to better understand the process in order toimprove quality of the final product. Working with numerical simulations of themetal shearing process, there aretwo major difficulties. One being the extremely large deformation, the other being material failure. The combinationof these two makes numerical modeling challenging and is the reason for this study.The problem was divided in to two main parts, one where material modeling was studied, the other part focusedon numerical modeling and experiments of the punching process. A material model considering both plasticityandmaterial failure was created for a boron steel material. Plasticity behavior of thematerial was modeled with anelasto-plastic model and a calibratedModifiedMohr-Coulomb (MMC) failure criterion to model the material failure.The resultingMMC-model agreed well with the experiments.Punching experiments with varying clearances were performed on the boron steel. Punch forces and displacementswere continuously sampled throughout the process, and after the punching experiments were finished the punchededge profiles were studied. The multiphysics simulation software LS-DYNA was then utilized, and three dimensionalsimulations of the punching process using the Smoothed Particle Galerkin (SPG)method were performed.Results from the SPG-simulation corresponded very well with the results from punching experiments, and it can beconcluded that the model was able to capture the material behavior of the sheet in a highly detailed level. When thepunched edge profiles from the simulations were compared to the experiments, there was an almost exact match forall the cases studied. The force-displacement behavior of the punch from simulations was in great consistency withexperimental results as well.Itwas also concluded that the combination of a stress state dependent failure criterion together with the SPG-methodshows significant possibilities to cope with three dimensional problems where large deformations in combinationwith difficultmaterial failure occurs. This study focuses on the punching process, but the generality of this novelmodeling technique can be applied to many industrial cases and is a step towards a better and more reliablemodeling of failure in combination with extremely large deformation.