Simulating flow forming/spinning of as-cast aluminum at elevated temperature: example implicit & explicit FEA

This collection of files largely automates the creation and running of FEA models of rotary forming at temperature. The modelling approaches are detailed further here:

M.J. Roy, D.M. Maijer, Analysis and modelling of a rotary forming process for cast aluminium alloy A356, Journal of Materials Processing Technology, Volume 226, 2015, Pages 188-204, ISSN 0924-0136, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2015.06.036.

Briefly, the multi-stage model was developed with MATLAB 7.2 and Abaqus 11.2 and configured to run on a Linux-based system with PBS functionality, last tested on a muti-node CentOS 5 system. The main script is FFauto.m, which will write input files and user subroutines and call FFauto_Abaqus11Submit.m to run the input files or intermediate post-processing to set up the next job. More specifically:

FFauto will write an input deck based on 2D implicit heat transfer and then run it.

Once the analysis is complete, it will perform some cursory post processing by writing an Abaqus Python script and then submitting that.

Based on the post-processing of the implicit analysis, it will then generate a 3D explicit forming analysis input file. Depending on the operator's input, this can include an explicit cooling step as well.

It will then submit the 3D analysis.

Note that steps can be skipped - that is, if the results for an implicit heat transfer calculation are available, then it will use those results to generate the explicit step(s).

Note that the implicit user subroutine *uhard.f contains a DFLUX subroutine in addition to the UHARD subroutine. This was not employed in the published work. Leave the ArtHeat variable as True to both speed up simulation times and get similar results as published.

Running FFauto.m is accomplished by submitting the FFauto4.pbs file.