Accelerating the FE-Simulation of Roll Forming Processes with the Aid of specific Process’s Properties

Roll forming is an effective and economical sheet forming process that is well‐established in industry for the manufacturing of large quantities of profile‐shaped products. In cold‐roll forming, a metal sheet is fed through successive pairs of forming rolls until it is formed into the desired cross‐sectional profile. The deformation of the sheet is complex. For this reason, the theoretical analysis is very difficult, especially, if the strain distribution and the occurring forces are to be determined [1]. The design of roll forming processes depends upon a large number of variables, which mainly relies upon experience based knowledge [2]. In order to overcome the challenges and to optimize these processes, FE‐simulations are used. The simulation of these processes is time‐consuming. The main objective of this work is to accelerate the simulation of roll forming processes by taking advantage of their steady state properties. These properties allow the transformation of points on the sheet metal according to a mathematical function. This transformation function is determined with the help of the finite element method and then the next forming steps are computed, based on the generated function. With the aid of this developed method, the computational time can be reduced effectively.