Rigid‐plastic finite element analysis of incremental radial forging process using the automatic expansion of domain scheme

The incremental radial forging process employs several tens or hundreds of incremental local strokes, so that the entire process is difficult to analyze due to large computation time and large computer memory. The objective of this work is to propose a new numerical scheme of the finite element method, automatic expansion of domain (AED), to reduce computation time and computer memory. In the AED scheme, an effective analysis domain in each local forging step is defined and then the domain is automatically expanded in accordance with the repeated process. In order to verify the validity of the criterion for the AED scheme and the applicability of the AED scheme, two‐dimensional incremental plane‐strain forging process is first analyzed using the proposed scheme with various criteria and full domain. In addition, three‐dimensional incremental radial forging process is analyzed to verify the applicability of the proposed scheme to a practical incremental forging process.