Continuous roll forming including in-line welding and post-cut within an ALE formalism

摘要

Cold roll forming is a rather old process for which there is a renewed interest due to its capacity to form ultra high-strength steels. For the first time ever in the literature, the manufacturing chain involving both the continuous cold roll-forming process, the in-line welding operation for closed sections and the post-cut operation is numerically modelled. The first phase of this process sequence consists in computing the hopefully steady state configuration of the strip for the total length of the roll-forming mill, including the in-line welding phase. For addressing this problem, the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) formalism is used. Once the ALE steady state is reached, the computation is pursued with a second Lagrangian phase which is aimed at simulating the post-cut operation that releases the formed section from the rolling tools of the mill, enabling to determine the final geometry of the product. In this paper, the computational modelling framework employed within the in-house finite element code METAFOR is described.