C 3 M - Centre for Computational Continuum Mechanics

The C 3 M - Centre for Computational Continuum Mechanics (www.c3m.si) is a high-tech company specialised in the development of customized finite element systems for sensitivity analyses, inverse modeling and optimization of Multi-field, Multi-scale, Multi-body, Multi-phase and Multi-objective (M5) problems. Originally C3M was focused mainly on numerical analyses of material forming technologies using standard commercial finite element system. However, systematic advanced software development strategy based on a symbolic approach to automatic code generation using AceGen and AceFEM has put the company into a favorable position to extend their business to other high-tech applications in biomechanics, geomechanics, chemical engineering, pharmaceutical and food industry. The most recent advances have been made in space and aerospace.

One of the successful examples was simulation of ironing of polymer - metal laminates. This application is related to production of polymer coated food and beverage cans, which are made of electrolytic chromium coated steel (ECCS) covered by thermoplastic PET layers. The laminates of dissimilar materials are exposed to wide range of thermo-mechanical processing conditions caused by a sequence of drawing and ironing operations. From numerical point of view the most demanding operation is high-speed ironing. In mass production the local strain rates exceed 10.000 per second and the laminate is exposed to high contact pressures reaching up to 500 MPa. In these extreme strain rate, pressure and temperature conditions modelling of PET behavior becomes very difficult. C3M has used AceGen to develop new numerical model for polymer materials and AceFEM to perform necessary simulations. C3M has made remarkable progress in calibrating the numerical predictions with laboratory and industrial measurements to better understand complex response of polymer metal laminates to ironing and other large strain and deformation processes.