Thermo-viscoplastic numerical modeling of metal forging process by Pseudo Inverse Approach

Constant demands of light-weighting have forced many industries to resort to manufacturing practices that promise a component with a higher strength-to-weight ratio. Hot forging is one such method used to produce parts using difficult-to-form materials as well as to achieve complex geometries. Although numerical methods provide an efficient means to predict the material yield and the stress/strain states of the product at different stages of forming and classical methods are accurate enough to provide a suitable representation of the process, they tend to be computationally expensive. This limits their use in process optimization studies. The Pseudo Inverse Approach (PIA) developed in the context of 2D axisymmetric cold forming, provides a quick and fairly accurate estimate of the stress and strain fields in the final product for a given initial shape. In this work, the PIA is extended to include the thermal and viscoplastic effects associated with the hot forging process. The results are compared with commercially available software based on the classical approaches to show the efficiency and the limitations of PIA.