Hamidreza Gharehchahi - Department of Mechanical Engineering, Shiraz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran.
Mohammad Javad Kazemzadeh-Parsi - Department of Mechanical Engineering, Shiraz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran.
Ahmad Afsari - Department of Mechanical Engineering, Shiraz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran.
Mehrdad Mohammadi - Department of Mechanical Engineering, Shiraz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran.

In the deep drawing process, the optimal design of the initial blank shape has many advantages such as reducing the cost of production and waste and improving the quality of the process and thickness distribution.  The deep drawing process is highly nonlinear due to the large deformation, plastic deformation of the material and the contact phenomenon.  Therefore, the general solution to such problems is to use iterative methods based on numerical simulation.  The present study implements a similar approach and presents a new algorithm to make geometrical corrections to the external boundaries of a blank, as well as its internal boundaries, in several iterations.  A computer program was developed to automatically run these iterations to study the features of the proposed algorithm.  Next, an example problem was solved, and the results are compared with other studies.  The results showed that the proposed algorithm is sufficiently robust against the initial guesses for the blank, which is an advantage of the present algorithm over those from other algorithms.  Because in other algorithms presented in the articles, if the appropriate initial guess is not selected, the algorithm will not converge to the answer.  The proposed algorithm also has a higher convergence speed in achieving optimal blank.

Deep drawing, Shape Optimization, Blank Optimization, Finite Element Method