Rolling Operation Using Ansys Workbench

OBJECTIVE

• To assign the structural steel material to rollers, and copper to the workpiece.
• To assign the frictional contacts.
• To mesh the model.
• To apply the boundary condition.
• To collect the results and interpret.

PROCEDURE

The simulation seems to be static non-linear, therefore, it had to solve using the Static Structural module of Ansys. The rollers and workpiece model are shown in the figure below. Next, the material had to define before proceeding further. Using Engineering data, all the required materials viz. structural steel, and non-linear copper were imported.

Figure 1: Rollers and workpiece model in Ansys GUI.

The Mesh section of the Static Structural module was opened. In that, the material of the roller parts was set to structural steel, and the material of the workpiece was set to copper.

Further, the Ansys already detected the contact regions, and therefore default bonded contact was created. The automatically created contact cards were kept as it is but made a slight modification in contacting faces. The behavior of contact was changed from bonded to frictional with a coefficient of friction of 0.2.

Figure 2: Frictional contact set between the contacting faces.

After contact, a revolute joint was created for the two rollers as shown in the figure below.

Figure 3: Revolute joint created for the two rollers.

Then mesh was created for the model with a 4 mm element size for the workpiece. The analysis was solved in 14 steps. In boundary conditions, displacement load was applied to the workpiece as shown in the figure.

Figure 4: Displacement applied to the plate.

Further, equal and opposite rotation was applied to the rollers, such that it would push the workpiece to another side.

Figure 5: Equal and opposite rotation to the rollers.

In the solution, the results for equivalent stress for the whole model, equivalent plastic strain for the workpiece, and directional deformation for the workpiece were requested. The results of each case are shown in the figures below.

Figure 6: Equivalent stress induced in the whole model.

Figure 7: Equivalent plastic strain on the workpiece.

Figure 8: Directional deformation on the workpiece.

CONCLUSION

The work was performed to study the method of simulating the rolling operation using Ansys. For that, the material was assigned to the model, then contact was applied, and the mesh was created for it. Further, the boundary condition was applied, in which the workpiece was displaced to the maximum of 84.5 mm, a rotation was applied to both the rollers and the problem was solved. In the results, it can be observed from fig. 6 that maximum stress of 369.45 MPa was induced in the workpiece. Thus, it has gone under plastic deformation. From fig. 7, the maximum plastic strain of 1.214 can be observed on the edge of the workpiece. Due to Poisson's ratio, the lateral deformation can be clearly observed.