PARALLEL ENGINEERING SIMULATIONS BASED ON FORMING SIMULATION OF A HEAT EXCHANGER

Normally, simulation regarding computational fluid dynamics (CDF), structural mechanics and heat transfer simulations in sheet metal applications are made without a forming simulated part. Instead the simulation is based on especially constructed parts, with some kind of nominal geometry, only for the specific simulation. This paper presents the use of sheet metal forming simulation of an advanced thin sheet metal part as input to other simulations. Here forming simulation provides input data for different parallel simulations: simulation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), simulation of structural mechanics and thermal heat transfer simulations. From the forming simulation output e.g. pressed part geometry, it should be possible to use sheet metal thinning, residual stress and strain as input in other simulations later on. However, today it is not trivial to export and use the result from LS-DYNA to the desired application. We have developed a method for carrying a correct geometry into parallel simulations with input from forming simulated section. A special heat exchanger plate, with intensive and sharp patterns, was developed to study the influence of variations in geometry of the pressing tool. The sheet metal forming simulation was performed with LS-DYNA. A C++ program was developed to calculate new nodes in the surface of forming simulated section. This to be able to created a geometrically correct solid model as input in paralle