Numerical Simulation of Temperature Controlled Solid Phase Forming Process of Polymeric Plate

In this paper, a new forming process of polymeric plate called stretch‐forming was simulated by adopting the thermo‐elasto‐visco‐plastic large deformation finite element formulation based on Updated Lagrangian method. Some details of this forming process were also studied. It was shown that temperature has important effect on the forming process. Slide contact was assumed in the simulation. Friction force was ignored due to good lubrication. The adopted algorithm is verified by analyzing a thermoforming problem provided in a NUMIFORM’98 paper and comparing simulation results with experimental measures in that paper.