Abstract
In this study, a FEM analysis is undertaken of a rubber sleeve which is mounted onto a spreading mandrel so as to avoid marking the first wrappings of coils (known as the 'end-mark'), as occasionally occurs when a concentrated load is placed on the edge of a steel sheet, significantly reducing its quality. A commercial numerical package, ANSYS, was utilized to analyze the structural behavior of the rubber sleeve. In general, the strain of the sleeve increases as the thickness of the rubber layer (H) covering the tubes increases, thus also increasing the surface of the sleeve for a constant boundary condition, and decreasing the pitch (P) between each tube, resulting in an increase in the strain on the surface of the sleeve for all rubber thickness conditions tested here. In a comparison of two different materials, rubber and urethane, when H=3 mm and P=1.1D, the maximum total deformations in these cases are 0.12669 mm and 0.086623 mm, respectively.
