Adaptive remeshing in large plastic strain with damage

The analysis of mechanical structures using the finite element method in the framework of large elasto‐plastic strain, needs frequent remeshing of the deformed domain during the computation. Indeed, the remeshing is due to the large geometrical distortion of finite elements and the adaptation to the physical behaviour of the solution as the plastic strain or the damage fields. This paper gives the necessary steps to remesh a mechanical structure during large elasto‐plastic deformations with damage. An important part of this process concerns the geometrical and physical error estimates. The proposed method is integrated in a computational environment using the ABAQUS/Explicit solver and the BL2D‐V2 adaptive mesher. After recalling the formulation of the elasto‐plastic problem with damage, four types of applications using the proposed adaptive remeshing are given: orthogonal cutting, side‐pressing of an infinite cylinder, blanking and backward extrusion with drilling. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.