Hybrid SPH-FEM solver for metal cutting simulations on the GPU including thermal contact modeling

This paper presents a hybrid Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) – Finite Element Method (FEM) solver for metal cutting simulations on Graphics Processing Units (GPU). For the first time in chip formation simulation, the heat transfer between an SPH model of the workpiece, and a transient FEM temperature model for the cutting tool, is established. For validation, the performance of the modeled thermal contact between two numerical domains is compared with a commercial FEM software. The sensitivity of the implemented SPH-FEM contact parameters is investigated for the first time and further insights into the thermal modeling of cutting simulations are generated. Overall, the newly developed hybrid model saves the computational time on the cutting tool side in the pure SPH method and enables more efficient high-fidelity cutting simulations. By clearly defining the thermal contact at the tool-chip interface, the simulated tool surface temperature agrees well with the experimental measurements in the literature.