The Analysis to the Forming Process of Welded Pipe by Non-Linear Finite Element Method

Abstract

Understanding the mechanism of the forming of the welded pipe may help the engineer to design the shape of forming rollers and forming technology. It is hard to study the forming process of the welded pipe by both the method of experiment and numerical modeling because of too much nonlinear factors included in the forming process such as elastic-plastic large deformation and non linear contact. Although many research works have been conducted in this field by the method of experiment or numerical modeling, but few of the works deal with the whole forming process of the welded pipe. The main difficulties in the numerical modeling are of huge computational labor time, witch has been over the ability of the hardware and software of the computer. The whole process of roll forming of welded pipe has been simulated by nonlinear finite element method with ANSYS and LS-DYNA solver, the distribution of both stresses and strains have been got successfully. Mapping meshes and the rigid models for rollers have been used in the analysis in order to decrease the number of the elements. Numerical results and parameter study have shown that the forming rollers of both the level and vertical are the key factors to the forming process. It is believe that the method used in the paper can also be used to study the forming process of both cage roll forming and flexible forming.