Journal of Materials Processing Technology 121 (2002) 43±49

Enhanced ®nite element models of metal spinning

E. Quigleya, J. Monaghanb,*
a
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Technology Tallaght, Dublin 24, Ireland
b
Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Trinity College, Parsons Building, Dublin 2, Ireland
Accepted 5 September 2001

Abstract

Spinning is frequently used for manufacturing axi-symmetric shapes where press tooling might not be justi®ed on grounds of size and
production volumes. Spinning also has the possibility of producing parts that cannot be deep drawn. In this paper, conventional spinning is
studied that is a rotational forming process that does not set out to change the sheet thickness. Both the blank and the ®nished product have
roughly the same thickness.
Previous authors have proposed various analyses of the spinning process. This paper reports the ®nite element modelling of metal
spinning. Domain decomposition is a commercially available technique, which enables the partition of a ®nite element problem into sub-
problems that can be solved by using parallel processing techniques in a greatly reduced time. The software used is MARC as provided by
MSC Software. The hardware platforms used were Dell/Intel single and dual processor machines.
Earlier papers reported the dif®culties that a ®nite element modelling of spinning presented. An outline is given of how these problems are
tackled. Outstanding problems are reviewed with some potential solutions discussed. The results from the ®nite element models are
compared with experimental results obtained using a numerically controlled spinning process. The NC spinning was done using a light gauge
sheet aluminium (Al 99.0-Werkstoff 30205, material condition HH, 0.2% yield 110 MPa). # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Conventional metal spinning; Finite element analysis; Shear forming

1. Introduction solve, the length of time increment must be considered in

In order to understand the particular dif®culties that metal
spinning presents for ®nite element analysis, we must con-
sider the nature of metal spinning itself. It is an incremental
forming process that is achieved by relatively small forces.
Although any model must consider the equilibrium of the
entire workpiece, there is only a small portion of that
workpiece in contact with the roller or forming tool at
any given time. The mesh must be ®ne enough to allow
some continuity of contact as the nodal forces transfer from
one element to the next as the elements pass under the roller.
If it is too ®ne the solution times required become impos-
sibly large, while if it is too coarse there is little hope of
getting meaningful answers from the model.
Apart from the mesh de®nition, we must also consider
how the process is divided into time steps or increments. If
the increments are set too large, the model will not solve
because there are too many nodes making contact and
separating from the roller. In order to allow the model to
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: ‡353-1-6081936; fax: ‡353-1-6795554.
E-mail address: john.monaghan@tcd.ie (J. Monaghan).
terms of the speed of rotation of the workpiece or disk. It can
be made so small that each node spends many increments
approaching the roller but the cost of this will be very long
solution times. Three or four increments per element enter-
ing the contact region provides a reasonable compromise.
These and a variety of other issues form key decisions in
building a working ®nite element model.
2. Finite element model definition
A simple shape was chosen to provide a variety of forming
conditions. The shape consisted of ®nal diameter of 100 mm
with central section consisting of a spherical surface of
radius 95 mm with a blend radius between the cylindrical
and the spherical sections of 17 mm. This shape is similar to
that used in an investigation of working forces during
conventional spinning [1]. Also this shape was analysed
in terms of the strains arising in spinning and of constant
thickness spinning and shear forming [2]. The model in
Fig. 1 follows these dimensions, with the addition of a
20 mm central ¯at to allow the tailstock to clamp the blank
against the former.

0924-0136/02/$ ± see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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44 E. Quigley, J. Monaghan / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 121 (2002) 43±49

Fig. 1. A complete finite element model of spinningÐleft: model; right: spinning in progress.

Firstly, it must be decided how the process of spinning can
be modelled. The previous analysis [3] looks at the modelling
of contact between a roller and a thin sheet. It is possible to
consider the complete process where the entire blank is rotated
under a moving roller, which traverses a prescribed tool path.
This path may consist of a single pass or multiple passes
depending on the particular part shape. Fig. 1 gives some idea
of the main parts of the ®nite element model required.
The disk is the only deformable body in the model. The
central area is not meshed as it is essentially held unde-
formed between the tailstock and the former. The former,
roller and tailstock are rigid surfaces. These are represented
as analytical surfaces during the simulation. In this parti-
cular model, the roller is not modelled as a complete surface
of revolution but only the region likely to come in contact
with the disk is modelled. Friction coef®cients can be set
individually for each component. The friction coef®cient for
the roller is set to zero as it was felt that this would best
represent the very low friction rolling contact with the disk.
The actual spinning equipment can be seen in the second
part of the diagram. The roller is made from nylon which has
inherent low friction properties.
2.2. Mesh definition
It is obvious that the forming process under consideration
is dealing with a thin sheet of material. It could be concluded
from this that the best type of element for modelling the
process might be a shell element. There are, however, certain
limitations with shell elements, e.g. the element cannot
make contact with two other contact bodies at the same
time. The process of spinning is at least partly one of
squeezing the sheet metal between the roller and the former
so it is critical that the model can handle contact with both
sides of the sheet at the same time. So, for this reason, the
model uses eight-noded hexahedral brick elements.
Fig. 2 shows the detail of a typical mesh. Three elements
are used through the thickness of the sheet. The circumfer-
ence is divided into 36 segments of 108 and the radius of the
disk is divided into 16 elements along 50 mm from the
tailstock to the edge of the disk. It can be seen from the
diagram that the proportions of the elements are more like
those of a ¯at tile than a brick. The exact effect of using
elements with this aspect ratio remains the matter of inves-
tigation.

2.1. Assessment of model performance

Two criteria were chosen to assess the effectiveness of any

particular simulation run. These were, ®rstly, the ratio of
computing time to simulated process time and, secondly, the
amount of process time that was simulated.
It was also necessary to choose some relatively simple
criterion for assessing the quality of any individual model or
set of modelling parameters. This was chosen to be roller
force output. A single parameter could be plotted against
time and very quickly the stability of the process model
could be assessed. This choice of parameter (roller force)
avoids the necessity to examine in detail the very large result
®les. File sizes can easily reach 100 MB and without careful
consideration of the output speci®ed (write frequency, etc.)
they have occasionally exceeded 1 GB in size. An example
of roller force output is shown in Fig. 3. Fig. 2. Mesh detail.
 E. Quigley, J. Monaghan / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 121 (2002) 43±49 45

Fig. 3. An example of results from adaptive meshing model.

A model of …3  45  16† 2160 elements proved reason-
able from the point of view of solution times. A model with
these elements divided by two in each of the sheet directions,
i.e. with four times the number of elements, could not be
solved on a single processor machine with 128 MB of RAM.
A mesh of …3  50  28† 4200 elements was also used, but it
required substantially longer solution times.
2.3. Adaptive meshing
This might seem to be the ideal solution to the problem,
i.e. let the model automatically re®ne the mesh where it
comes into contact with the roller. The facility to do this is
available in MARC and was used with some models. How-
ever although the number of elements is reduced again (the
mesh is unre®ned) after passing through the roller-contact
region, the model maintains a record of all the nodes created.
In any event, the entire mesh will eventually pass through the
contact area, and so the node count and size of the results ®le
will tend towards the size that would have been reached if a
®ner mesh were used. A further dif®culty is that the domain
decomposition technique cannot be applied if adaptive
meshing is used and so the potential for solution time
reduction with parallel processing would be lost. Fig. 3
shows how adaptive meshing can give very detailed results
in an area of interest and provide stable force output as well.
The contour plot is a section through the disk showing the
former to the left and the roller to the right. The detail shows
that there is a region directly underneath the roller that
undergoes compressive strain at the contact surface, while
the opposite surface experiences tensile strain. The adaptive
meshing model achieved a simulation of effectively 0.08 s in
a solution time of 7 h approximately.
2.4. Time divisions
In any model, a smaller time increment would be expected
to give the more re®ned output, but reducing the size of the
increment alone will not ensure a smooth output or a stable
model. From Fig. 4, we see the roller force curves plotted for

Fig. 4. Similar roller forces with different time steps.

46 E. Quigley, J. Monaghan / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 121 (2002) 43±49
the same model with the exception that the time increment
has been reduced. It can be seen that they share similar
dif®culty with a roller force output. This model is without
the smoothing and stabilising in¯uence of adaptive meshing.
It can be seen that the time period that has been modelled is
signi®cantly longer, 0.29 s (solution time: 40 h) with the
0.00025 s time step than 0.20 s (solution time: 74 h) with the
0.0001 time step. Part of the reason for this can be found in
the contact detection and contact separation method, and the
parameter values used.
2.5. Contact definition
The MARC software uses a direct constraint contact
algorithm. In this procedure, the motion of the bodies is
tracked and when contact occurs direct constraints (both
kinematic and nodal force) are placed on the motion as
boundary conditions [4] (Fig. 5). A contact tolerance is used
to de®ne a zone on either side of the contact surface. If a
node is detected within this zone, it is moved to the surface.
This zone can be biased so that it is unevenly distributed on
either side of the contact surface. This is useful in that the
contact zone does not have to be very thin to avoid dragging
non-contacting elements onto the surface. It enables a
reasonable tolerance to be used and avoids nodes passing
through the surface.
If we look at the forces that the former is applying to the
workpiece, it should obviously be capable of only applying a
pressure to the underside of the disk. In fact, in this model
the former fails to release the node in contact and results in a
completely anomalous adhesion force.
2.6. The use of restarts
As the solution times of the spinning simulations get
longer the option of writing restart data allows the simula-
tion to be resumed at arbitrary stages in the solution. This
facility proved useful at certain stages, but it does not
Fig. 5. Opposing nodal force error.
remove the source of the problem. For example, if the roller
force has become large/unstable due to excessive squeezing
of the workpiece, then various parameters could be adjusted
before restarting the solution.
2.7. Parallel processing and domain decomposition
This technique effectively divides the mesh into super
elements. The advice given is that the boundaries between
these super elements or domains should be kept as small as
possible. So in the case of the disk, it was simply divided into
four segments of 908. These partitions are solved indepen-
dently by separate processors. This particular model was run
on two dual processor machines.
In theory, it should be possible to use whatever number of
processors are available, but there is a recommendation for a
network connection with a capacity of 100 MB/s, and it can
be expected that if a large number of separate machines are
used, demands for network capacity will increase. One
further point of interest about parallel processing is that
the MARC executable code does have to be installed on the
remote machines, i.e. computers that are not usually used for
MARC could be harnessed.
The ®rst tentative steps at parallel processing have been
very encouraging. The result of dividing the disk into four
domains was a reduction of the solution time by about the
same factor. There was in fact a reduction in solve time by a
factor of 4.1, but it remains to be seen that if this is greater,
then proportional advantage can be maintained during
long solutions. At the time of writing, a new release of
software (MARC 2000) has been received which should
enable this question to be answered for models of metal
spinning.
3. Tool paths
It has long been established that de®ning the motion of the
tool or roller in any spinning operation is the key to the
ancient craft of metal spinning. In hand spinning, the
operator can feel the force being exerted and can detect
any developing buckling, so the operator can readily move
the tool to reduce the force and add a further tool movement
or tool pass to work a dif®cult area. In fact, from this it
could be surmised that the process would be more easily
force controlled than position controlled. Unfortunately,
most conventional NC lathes or turning centres are con-
trolled to ensure the highest possible accuracy of cutter
position.
In order to limit the force applied to the workpiece by the
roller, great care must be taken to maintain a uniform
distance between the roller and the former throughout the
pass. If one considers a 1 mm thick sheet compressed
elastically by 0.001 mm, the resulting stress is about
70 MPa, thus it is easily seen that positioning the roller is
critical. The simplest solution is to try to avoid a direct
 E. Quigley, J. Monaghan / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 121 (2002) 43±49 47

Fig. 6. Equivalent stress and strain with gap.

Fig. 7. Equivalent stress and strain as interference occurs.

compression of the disk between the roller and the former.
Programming the tool to maintain a 1.1 m distance from the
former for a 1.0 mm thick disk is a reasonable approach.
Figs. 6 and 7 illustrate the difference in stress and strain
patterns that might arise between a tool path with gap as
opposed to an interference. Figs. 6 and 7 present Von Mises
equivalent stress and equivalent plastic strain for a very
similar region to that shown in the detail of Fig. 3 (the disk
just beneath the roller).
There is no elastic compliance in the tools. The roller and
the former are modelled as rigid surfaces. Given that the
roller mounting and roller surface are not perfectly rigid the
stresses and strains may not increase as sharply in reality as
in the current model. Nonetheless a very small tool position
change can profoundly affect the process. The investigation
of spinning with elastic tool bodies is certainly an interesting
possibility that may well be approachable with parallel
processing, but it has fallen beyond the scope of this paper.
4. Results
4.1. Finite element model output assessment
The above discussion of how to set-up a functioning
model counts for very little if the modelling itself is not
48 E. Quigley, J. Monaghan / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 121 (2002) 43±49
Fig. 8. Roller force output from a 4200 element model with a 0.00091 time step.
producing useful results. It is very interesting to see how
the model reports stresses and strains in different areas of
the workpiece, but each simulation run produces a lot of
data. To avoid getting bogged down in detail, it is necessary
to choose a single output parameter that characterises the
results of the model. The chosen parameter is the force on
the roller.
Force output from the roller for working a 1 mm thick
disk is shown in Fig. 8. The model output is only for 0.75 s,
but the value of the force can be seen to be about 200 N
which agrees reasonably with Qiang et al. [1], who report a
working force of 300 N as representative of a process with
three roller passes lasting over 100 s. What is also to be
observed in this diagram is a cyclic variation in the work-
ing forces. There are regular maxima to be seen in the axial
force (force X in the diagram). These correspond to the
roller feeding outwards over the edges of elements at a
particular distance from the centre axis. This re¯ects the
discrete nature of the ®nite element model. The variation is
even more apparent in the radial force (force Y in the
diagram).
The values are all consistent with those reported by Qiang
et al. [1]. The axial force is the largest (around 200 N) and is
much larger than the radial force (around 15 N) and the
tangential force is very much smaller again. Tangential force
is not graphed in Fig. 8. The dif®culties with contact
and separation detection are evident in the force curves in
Fig. 8, but the problem is considerably less severe than in
Fig. 4. This can be explained by changes made to increase
the number of elements and reduce the size of time incre-
ment.
The illustration in Fig. 1 gives some idea of how far the
simulation went towards forming the complete shape. A
signi®cant amount of forming has been done, but the part is
far from being fully formed.
5. Conclusions
There is a reasonable agreement between the results of the
simulations and the work of other authors. While NC spin-
ning operations have been successfully conducted, these
operations are as yet not instrumented to give force mea-
surements. An NC spinning operation equipped with force
measurement facilities will allow precise matching of roller
passes, etc., between the simulated and the real spinning
process. Also as the simulations are improved in terms of
process time simulated, it is planned to compare experi-
mental and simulated strains as well as forces.
The potential for the use of parallel processing in
solving these types of ®nite element problems is clear,
but it is the very nature of the spinning process that makes
it hard to simulate. Every new position of the disk and
roller is only forming a small area of the product, yet it is
necessary to model the whole disk. The process is unlike
stamping or drawing where each incremental movement of
the punch is forming the entire workpiece. Applying the
power of new computing techniques and equipment to the
 E. Quigley, J. Monaghan / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 121 (2002) 43±49
simulation of incremental forming holds out interesting
possibilities.
References
[1] W. Qiang, W. Tao, Z.R. Wang, A study of the working force in
conventional spinning, in: Proceedings of the International Conference
on Rotary Forming, The Forging and Stamping Institution of CMES,
Beijing, October 1989.
49
[2] E. Quigley, J. Monaghan, Metal forming: an analysis of spinning
processes, in: Proceedings of the Sixth International Confe rence on
Sheet Metal, University of Twente, Netherlands, 1998.
[3] E. Quigley, J. Monaghan, An analysis of conventional spinning of light
sheet metal, in: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference
on Sheet Metal, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg,
Germany, 1999.
[4] MARC K7.3 User Theory, Vol. D, MARC Analysis and Research
Corp., Palo Alto, USA.