Abstract: This study is concerned with the problems of contact in the process of numerical simulation of sheet metal forming in rigid visco-plastic shell FEM. In respect of analysis of sheet deep drawing process,for the tool model described by triangular elements, a kind of contact judging algorithm about the correlation between the node of deformed mesh and the triangular element of a tool is presented. In SPF/DB Lagrangian multiplier method is adopted to solve the contact problem between deformed meshes, and a new reliable practical dynamic contact checking algorithm is presented. As computation examples, the simulation results of metal sheet deep drawing and SPF/DB are introduced in this paper.

Key words: kcontact search algorithm, rigid visco-plastic shell FEM, Lagrangian multiplier method, sheet metal forming