Flexible rolling

Abstract

Environmental as well as economic aspects have led to various changes in main industrial sectors like the automotive branch. One particular trend is the urge to reduce the fuel consumption by lightweight design of structural components. Due to rising safety requirements those structural components also need to provide high strength and crashworthiness. A possible approach to combine the idea of weight reduction and enhanced crashworthiness is the production of load-aligned semi-finished products that can be further processed to structural parts. Therefore, the flexible rolling process has been invented in the past years and is nowadays used on a large industrial scale. The basic principle of flexible rolling is an online adaption of the roll gap during a cold rolling process resulting in a thickness distribution of the strip in rolling direction. These so called tailor rolled blanks (TRBs) are successfully used to manufacture structural parts with non-uniform thickness.