External Piloting with FORGE for Ring Rolling Application: A collaboration between Muraro and Transvalor

Angelo Sartori

MURARO Spa

Patrice Lasne

Transvalor S.A.

Marcello Gabrielli

EnginSoft Spa

 

The "secret" of an efficient Ring rolling production process is the ability of the ring rolling machine to maintain centered the ring, and drive the grow in height and diameter, avoiding non-round shapes and defects. In the real process, this work is done directly from the numerical control acting on the mandrel, cones and the centering rolls (position and Force), starting from a definition of lamination curves, defined in the software by the operator. The machine try to respect this program, monitoring the shape of the ring, by some laser measuring system and load sensors, correcting the kinematic of the tools. In the last years several approaches have been used to simulate this process, always with the limit that the lamination curves must be inserted manually from the user and cannot change during the simulation. This paper is a summary of the work made by Muraro Spa, together with Transvalor S.A., the developer of FEM software Forge and EnginSoft Spa, competence center on production process simulation. The aim of this work was to develop an interface able to read, in real-time during the calculation, the position of some virtual sensors (virtual laser measuring), pass informations like position, but also loads and others, to an external routine, able to calculate corrections of the kinematic of all the tools and write back these corrections in Forge. During the simulation, thi approach allows to correct step-by-step the lamination curve. The logic in the simulation external black-box and in the program driving the piloting of the press is the same, so this guarantees that the results obtained with this new approach in the simulation are close to the real one. Next step of the work will be to extend the application of this interface to other models of special machines, but also to different kind of presses normally used to deform metallic (and non-metallic) materials.

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