Fracture and wrinkling are two primary failure modes in deep drawing of sheet metal parts.
Previous studies showed that properly selected variable blank holder force (BHF) profile, i.e. variation of BHF with punch stroke, can eliminate these failures to draw deeper parts.
In this study, an adaptive simulation strategy was developed to adjust the magnitude of the BHF continuously during the simulation process. Thus, a BHF profile is predicted in a single process simulation run and the computation time is reduced. The proposed strategy has been applied successfully to two conical cup drawing operations. The predictions have been compared with experiments and the results indicate that the adaptive simulation strategy can also be used to improve the drawing process for forming non-symmetric parts.