Design of Z Profile Roller Tooling and Research on Roller Clearance

In metal processing, bending forming is widely applied in various fields. To prevent excessive surface scratching and heavy indentation on the profiles, which can negatively affect the surface quality, it is often necessary to determine the clearances between the rollers and the upper and lower surfaces of the profiles using experimental methods. However, this experimental approach not only results in material waste but also fails to determine the optimal clearance value. Therefore, orthogonal experiments were conducted to design different clearances between the rollers and the upper and lower surfaces of the profiles to mitigate the issues of excessive surface scratching and poor surface quality during the bending forming process of large-section Z-profiles. Finite element simulation was employed to simulate the different experiments, and a range analysis was performed on the experimental results to obtain the optimal clearance value. The obtained results fall within the range of results obtained from traditional experimental methods, indicating its consistency with actual practice, higher accuracy, and scientific rigor compared with experimental methods. Furthermore, the roller tooling design was revised based on the optimal clearance value for the profile processing. The experimental results demonstrate that the surface quality of the profiles processed with optimal clearance is superior to those processed without it. Additionally, this study presents a comprehensive methodology for roller tooling design and investigates the influence of different loading modes on the local wrinkling deformation of the profiles.