A comparison study of Chain-die Forming and roll forming by forming a top hat section

Chain-die Forming, a novel sheet metal forming method, has been proposed and developed recently to overcome the problems that arose in roll forming. As an extension to roll forming, Chain-die Forming has been proposed to elongate the deformation length by increasing the virtual roll radii, and employing discrete profiled die-blocks which move on a track board with the desired large radii to im-plement or simulate the rotation of the virtual large rolls. The roll radii are so large and the forming length is so long that all redundant strain components occurring in roll forming are significantly reduced or even eliminated.