Aluminum Bottle Forming Simulation with Abaqus

This paper presents several modeling techniques for simulating and optimizing
aluminum bottle forming using Abaqus/Explicit. Designing and tuning sheet-metal forming tools for aluminum bottles are quite complicated and time consuming tasks. These tasks must take into consideration a number of potential issues, such as the success rate of forming, bottle shape smoothness, bottle load capacity, sheet-metal over-thinning, and metal wrinkling. To shorten the design cycle and reduce the number of forming tool prototypes for the Coke Contour aluminum bottle, simulations with Abaqus served as virtual test grounds to provide valuable insight into the bottle’s complex forming processes. Because of large deformation and contact interactions, Abaqus nonlinear capabilities were well suited for these tasks. This paper demonstrates Abaqus forming applications that helped resolve issues arising from realistic industrial forming design and production processes. Three bottle-forming simulations used to predict sheet-metal forming instability, metal over-thinning, and metal wrinkling are used to illustrate the effectiveness of numerical simulations.