Abstract: A new meshless method for calculating the plastic deformation of strip rolling process, which is named the flow function - element free Galerkin method abbreviated as F-EFGM, is developed based on the element free Galerkin method to overcome its low calculating efficiency and complexity in boundary treatment by inducing the flow function into the method. The velocities are partial derivatives of the flow function. The order of the stiffness matrix is decreased when the flow function instead of velocity at every node in the solution region becomes the main variable to be resolved. Besides, the boundary processing is more convenient since the volume invariability is automatically satisfied by inducing the flow function. In order to demonstrate the advantage of the new numerical method, the two dimensional strain rolling process is simulated and properly analyzed. The results show that the calculation efficiency is dramatically lifted compared to the original method. The validity of the new method is also verified by comparing the results to those with the rigid-plastic finite element method and some experimental observations in the references.

Key words: element-free Galerkin method, flow function, meshless method, strip rolling