Abstract: In order to explore the influence of element types and meshing methods on the turning simulation process of aviation thin-walled cylinder, Abaqus and AdvantEdge were used to compare and analyze the turning process of thin 3D model and thin-walled cylinder model, and the cutting simulation quality was evaluated with the main cutting force and chip morphology as the indexes. The results show that the hexahedral mesh can greatly save the computation time on the premise of guaranteeing the thin 3D cutting simulation accuracy. According to the comparison and analysis of the thin-wall cylinder model, the hexahedral mesh can better reflect the changes of physical parameters such as chip morphology and machined surface quality in the cutting process. Sweep method can improve the efficiency and surface quality of workpiece to a certain extent.