Application of abductive network and FEM to predict the optimal blank contour of an elliptic cylindrical cup from deep drawing

In this paper, the finite element method is employed in conjunction with the abductive network to predict the optimum blank contour of an elliptic cylindrical cup with ear-less in deep drawing. The earring behavior of the drawn cup is caused primarily by planar anisotropy in the sheet. Different cup heights combined with various aspect ratios of the elliptic cylindrical cup are taken into account as the process parameters in this study. A finite element-based code is utilized to investigate the material flow characteristics under different process parameters, and the abductive network is then employed to synthesize the data sets obtained from numerical simulations, thus establishing a predictive model. From this model, an optimal blank contour for producing an elliptic cylindrical cup with ear-less can be found. Experiments were carried out with low carbon steel sheet blanks at room temperature for some cases, and the results of experiments show good agreement with the FEM calculations.