Development of a Rubber Diaphragm Forming Simulation System Based on ABAQUS

Abstract

Rubber diaphragm forming is one of very important manufacture method in aircraft manufacturing. In order to achieve the purpose of precise forming and high efficient simulation of the rubber diaphragm forming for the aircraft sheet metal parts in CAE software of ABAQUS, first the blank design module is developed and embedded into ABAQUS in the use of one step inverse finite element method because there is no blank design algorithm in ABAQUS. Then according to the characteristics of the rubber diaphragm forming, development technology on ABAQUS is applied to develop a rubber diaphragm forming simulation system based on combining Graphical User Interface GUI and the scripting language of Python. In this system, the parameter definition plug-in and finite element modeling module are designed to save a lot of tedious steps, so the blank parameters and process parameters can be defined rapidly and the simulation process can be simplified in ABAQUS, which can greatly improve the analysis speed and improve the efficiency of the finite element method. Finally the accuracy and effectiveness of the rubber diaphragm forming simulation system are verified by the simulation of a typical part that is a door frame bracket of aircraft.