An advanced meshless technique for large deformation analysis of metal forming

Large deformation analysis is one of the major challenges in numerical modelling and simulation of metal forming. Although the finite element method (FEM) is a well-established method for modelling non-linear problems, it often encounters difficulties for large deformation analyses due to the mesh distortion issues. Because no mesh is used, the meshless methods show very good potential for large deformation analysis. In this paper, a local meshless formulation is developed for large deformation analysis. The Radial Basis Function (RBF) is employed to construct the meshless shape functions, and the spline function with high continuity is used as the weight function in the construction of the local weak form. The discrete equations for large deformation of solids are obtained using the local weak-forms, RBF shape functions and the total Lagrangian approach, which refers all variables to the initial (undeformed) configuration. This formulation requires no explicit mesh in computation and therefore fully avoids mesh distortion difficulties in the large deformation analysis of metal forming. Several example problems are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed meshless technique. It has been found that the developed meshless technique provides a superior performance to the conventional FEM in dealing with large deformation problems in metal forming.