Design and Performance Considerations of the

Continuos Four-roll Bender: A Precision Machine

for the Roller Bending of Plates

Dr. M. Hua Dr. K. Baines

Data Products Components(HK)Ltd. Senior Lecturer
5/11 Floor, Blocks C&D Department of Manufacturing Eng.
Sime Darby Industrial Est. Centre City Polytechnic of Hong Kong
420 Kwung Tong Rd., Kowloon Kowloon
Hong Kong Hong Kong

Professor D. H. Sansome
Managing Director
Technoform-Sonics Limited
9 Enterprise Trading Estate
Pedmore Road
Brierley Hill
West Midlands DY5 nx

Summary
The production of high quality tubular sections by the roller bending of
plates through a set of three- or four-rollers requires a thorough
understanding of the mechanics of the process. Although some analyses
have been conducted of the three-roll pyramid roller bender there is little
information relating to the inherently more precise four-roll configuration.
To simulate a prototype four-roll bender an extensive design study was
undertaken from which evolved an experimental model bender. The
comprehensive instrumentation, which included roll load, bending and
torque transducers, allowed single and multi-pass continuous bending
processes to be studied.

Notation
Symbols and subscripts used in this paper are either in standard usage or
defined in the text.

Introduction

Cylindrical tube sections are widely used in most engineering structures,

such as pressure vessels, heat exchanger shells, boiler chambers etc. They

P. Seyfried et al. (eds.), Progress in Precision Engineering

© Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg 1991
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also form a major structural module of modern off-shore oil rigs, tunnels
and industrial buildings.

Large diameter sections are more economically manufactured by welding

together plate which has been bent to form cylindrical lengths. The

existing plate bending techniques available are stamp-bending and

stretch-bending etc. However, they require a relatively heavy tooling and
labour investment.

The roller bender is a more versatile machine and is becoming more widely
used for the production of tubular sections. The advantages of the roller
bender over the plate-bending machine are that:

(i) It may be used to bend plate with precision to different sectional

shapes.
(ii) It can bend plate to different radii, with a minimum radius just
larger than that of the top roll of the bender.
(iii) It minimises the remaining straight section of a finished bent plate.

The advantage of the roller plate bending process has been fully realized
and various types of roller benders developed to fulfil different working
functions [1], [2], [3] and [4]. However there is little documentation of the
mechanics of the roller bending of plate and it is for this reason that a
study [5] of the more precise four-roller plate bending process was
initiated. Such a bender, the Verrina, was installed at Head Wrightson

Teesdale (HWT) and to realise its full potential a model bender was
designed at Aston University to simulate and optimise the HWT bender.

Objectives
The objectives of this section of the research were to:

(i) produce a reliable theoretical prediction of the forces and

torques on the bender rolls for various plate conditions, and