Tutorial: Sheet metal pass through a roller

This tutorial uses a Dynamic Event Simulation analysis to model the rolling of a steel slab, to simulate the manufacture of steel plate. This is a process that is repeated multiple times in the manufacturing of steel plate where a large billet of steel is passed through a series of rollers to achieve the final plate thickness. Here we model a single pass through a roller to produce a 25% reduction in the thickness of the plate.

The roller has a radius of 175 mm and is spinning at a fixed angular velocity of 314.159 rad/s, which corresponds to 3000 RPMs (revolutions per minute). While this is much faster than a real-world rolling machine would operate, at this speed the analysis time is very short and the results are quite comparable to real-world speeds of ~60 RPMs.

The steel slab is 20 mm thick initially and 100 mm long, and is pushed into the roller by a rigid block. Friction between the roller and the steel slab then draws the plate through the rolling process. For the purposes of this tutorial, the out-of-plane thickness of the model is 20 mm.

In this tutorial you

metal roller schematic sheet metal animation
Sheet metal rolling model design Animation showing sheet metal strains as it is flattened by 25%.

Prerequisites