Many industries such as shipbuilding require steel bending plates in a wide range of radii, thus bending machines are often designed and produced on a custom basis in shipyards. From a design perspective, however, the bending force and the radius of the bending plate as a function of vertical displacement of the upper roller must be known. In this paper, a hybrid numerical-analytical approach is proposed to investigate the three-roller bending process for two plates of steel used in the naval industry. Firstly, the bending process is modeled using the finite element (FE) method and regression models for the bending force as a function of plate thickness and vertical displacement of the upper roller were constructed. Then, based on the findings from FE analysis, using the bent bar theory, two analytical expressions for the bending force were derived. Using geometric and deformation compatibilities, analytical expressions for the vertical displacement of the upper roller as a function of the curvature of the bending plate were also developed. The FE results suggest that the cross section of the plate is practically a plastic hinge in the tangent area of the upper roller and that the deformation compatibilities must be considered in order to estimate the curvature radius of the bending plate using analytical formulations. These results are of practical importance in designing rolling machines to estimate the setting parameters.
Keywords: bending force; finite element analysis; three-rolling bending process; vertical displacement.