FEM Analysis of sheet metal drawing process adopts one of 3 methods based on the membrane, shell and continuum element:
Membrane elements:
Computational efficiency and superior convergence in contact analysis (adv)
Does not consider bending effect and it is inaccurate in bending dominant problems (disadv)
Shell elements:
Can capture the combination of stretching and bending and provides more degrees of freedom to capture accurate stress distribution (adv)
Notable amount of computational time and computer space for its 3D calculations (disadv)
Continuum elements:
Can handle through-thickness compressive straining (adv)
More elements are needed to describe the shell-type structures, so that a large system of equations must be solved (disadv)