Simulation And Analysis Of Blade Cold Roll Forming Process

Rolling process which is a new technology applying rolling deformation into forging production has stable working process, small equipment tonnage, fine work-piece mechanical properties and high production efficiency. Therefore, it has become one of the development trends of aviation blade manufacturing. But there are not further researches and regularity understandings of rolling process because of the complex shape of blade and difficult-to-deform performance of superalloys. So it will take much time to develop blade rolling process in practice as for the repeated fixing mould and debugging.The rotor blade of a certain aero-engine is the research object of this paper. Rolling theory is applied to analyze and calculate force, torque, forward slip and other parameters in the rolling process. The models of workpiece and mould are built and a volume forming software is used to simulate the process of the blade cold rolling. The distribution of equivalent stress, equivalent strain, rolling force and velocity field of the deformation area in every moment is quantitatively described by the simulation. Further more, forward slipping, broadening and rolling reduction was analyzed and calculated according to the velocity field. The simulation results of the blade rolling process are proved to be accurate by comparing the simulated rolling force and reduction with the calculated values. In addition, the material models contained in the software are not suitable for the superalloys. So a visco-plastic constitutive model is added to the software using the user subroutines to get more accurate results.Several simulations are made to study the influence of friction coefficient and roll speed on the blade forming. The results show that the rolling force and forward slip increase as friction coefficient increases; the overall speed of workpiece increases as the roll speed increases but the metal flow velocity has no apparent change. This paper provides reliable theory basis for the process parameters design, mould design and forecast of load and defects in the blade rolling process. A preferable roll forming law of blade can be obtained in order to improve blade rolling process.