Because of relative low investment cost on the installation of equipment and extensive product quality with other advantages, roll forming process has been broadly applied to produce profiles from steel strip bands and has gradually replaced aluminum profiles made by hot extrusion. Moreover, a lightweight design is the trend for reducing carbon emissions and waste. Therefore, a lightweight design of structures with local thinning used the roll forming production will make metal profiles more market competitiveness. In this study, the commercial Finite Element software DEFORM is used to investigate the rolling process preparing the metal strips with local thinning feature for the subsequent roll forming process to form a lightweight metal profile. Two kinds of roll configuration are used in this study, namely symmetrical and non-symmetrical. The symmetrical rolling process has the same diameter for the upper and the lower roll, while the non-symmetrical rolling process has different diameter in both rolls. As the process parameters, the roll speed ratio between the upper and the lower roll is used for the symmetrical rolling process, while the distance between the axis of the upper and lower roll is used for the non-symmetrical rolling process. As a result, the rolled thinning feature has its sidewalls flaring outwards, so that it has a narrow bottom and a wide opening. Furthermore, it can be regarded as defect that the thickness of the rolled thinning feature is not thinned enough as required and a raising at the opening is observed. In general, increasing the roll diameter or keeping the speed of the two rolls as the same can have a better thinning result for the symmetric rolling. In the non-symmetric rolling, increasing the roll diameter can improve the thickness, but no significant effect can be found by changing the roll diameter ratio.
Design of Roll-to-Roll Forming Process for Micro Pattern on the Thin Sheet Metal by Finite Element Analysis
