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Deformation in micro roll forming of bipolar plate

conference contribution
posted on 2017-09-30, 00:00 authored by Peng Zhang, Michael PereiraMichael Pereira, Bernard RolfeBernard Rolfe, D Wilkosz, Matthias WeissMatthias Weiss
Micro roll forming is a new processing technology to produce bipolar plates for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) from thin stainless steel foil. To gain a better understanding of the deformation of the material in this process, numerical studies are necessary before experimental implementation. In general, solid elements with several layers through the material thickness are required to analyse material thinning in processes where the deformation mode is that of bending combined with tension, but this results in high computational costs. This pure solid element approach is especially time-consuming when analysing roll forming processes which generally involves feeding a long strip through a number of successive roll stands. In an attempt to develop a more efficient modelling approach without sacrificing accuracy, two solutions are numerically analysed with ABAQUS/Explicit in this paper. In the first, a small patch of solid elements over the strip width and in the centre of the "pre-cut" sheet is coupled with shell elements while in the second approach pure shell elements are used to discretize the full sheet. In the first approach, the shell element enables accounting for the effect of material being held in the roll stands on material flow while solid elements can be applied to analyse material thinning in a small discrete area of the sheet. Experimental micro roll forming trials are performed to prove that the coupling of solid and shell elements can give acceptable model accuracy while using shell elements alone is shown to result in major deviations between numerical and experimental results.

History

Event

International Deep Drawing Research Group. Conference (36th : 2017 : Munich, Germany)

Volume

896

Series

International Deep Drawing Research Group Conference

Pagination

1 - 8

Publisher

IOP Publishing

Location

Munich, Germany

Place of publication

Bristol, Eng.

Start date

2017-07-02

End date

2017-07-06

ISSN

1742-6588

Language

eng

Publication classification

E Conference publication; E1 Full written paper - refereed

Copyright notice

2017, P Zhang et al.

Editor/Contributor(s)

W Volk

Title of proceedings

IDDRG 2017 : Materials modelling and testing for sheet metal forming : Proceedings of the 36th IDDRG 2017 Conference