Contributions à la simulation de l’enlèvement de matière par abrasion

The production of mechanical parts with high added value involves significant machining times and sometimes requires the functional surfaces to be finished by abrasion in order to achieve the required specifications. The correct definition of the parameters of the manufacturing process plays an important role in obtaining the final surface finish on the parts produced. In this context, the control of involved parameters is still carried out empirically.The thesis focuses on the polishing of functional surfaces and in particular on the prediction and realistic simulation of the effects of abrasion processes on surface topography. The proposed work contributes to the study of new simulation methods for abrasion. More specifically, the scientific challenge of this work is to create a breakthrough with conventional simulations, using meshless methods, and to evaluate their performance in this context. The simulation results obtained in indentation and scratching tests have been compared to experimental results and are in agreement. However, the simulation times are too long to envisage a complete abrasion simulation involving the passage of hundreds of abrasive grains.To overcome these difficulties, the development of an abrasion model based on the implicit representation of surfaces was carried out. The abrasion process is modelled using this surface representation formalism. A complete manufacturing process from machining to abrasion is successfully simulated and experimentally validated. The models studied could be a possible foundation for the development of an industrial simulation framework. The contribution of simulations to the automation of abrasion operations and the optimization of manufacturing processes could help to increase the productivity and quality of mechanical parts.