New and effective remeshing scheme for the simulation of metal forming processes (Q1198123)

The finite element method (FEM) is used for the simulation of metal forming processes with complicated die geometries. The given version is restricted to 2-D and uses a remeshing scheme added to FINEL, a FEM program. The remeshing scheme has to fulfill the following requirements: -- The mesh consists of convex quadrilateral elements having internal angles close to 90 degrees. -- The region to be meshed is a polygonal area. -- Since volume conservation is required it is sufficient to mesh the region approximately. -- Meshing should be robust. The authors propose a novel automatic, two-dimensional quadrilateral mesh generator. Mesh generation is performed by means of image processing and computational geometry. Some concrete applications are given.