Thesis for the Degree of Licentiate of Engineering Efficient Simulation and Optimization for Tandem Press Lines

Today, simulation is needed as one of the tools for optimum utilization of a press line. Utilization includes: high throughput, minimum ware of the line and high quality. High quality includes quality of the produced parts, quality of the stamping dies and quality of the tooling manufactured. In order to perform efficient geometrical simulation and virtual commissioning in stamping, two main fields are investigated namely simulation time and optimization time. Thus, reducing computation time is the main theme of this thesis. An efficient press line simulation model is built and verified, resulting in reduced simulation building time due to the modularization of the model. To reduce simulation time, collision detection time is reduced by a method based on 3D to 2D geometrical collision detection. The method is based on pre-calculation of all collision points in the environment of interest, and then using a simplified collision detection model in a simulation based optimization. This is less resource consuming than collision checking the original 3D objects for all optimization evaluations. The suggested approach reduces the collision detection from a 3D to a 2D problem, where collision between simplified bu