Superplastic forming using NIKE3D

The superplastic forming process requires careful control of strain rates in order to avoid strain localizations. A load scheduler was developed and implemented into the nonlinear finite element code NIKE3D to provide strain rate control during forming simulation and process schedule output. Often the sheets being formed in SPF are very thin such that less expensive membrane elements can be used as opposed to shell elements. A large strain membrane element was implemented into NIKE3D to assist in SPF process modeling