Abstract
Roll forming refers to the production of long plate-molded products, such as panels, pipes, tubes, channels, and frames, by continuously causing the bending deformation to thin plates using rotating rolls. As the roll forming method has advantages in terms of mass production because of its excellent productivity, the size of the roll forming industry has been continuously increasing and the roll forming method is increasingly being used in diverse industrial fields as a very important processing method. Furthermore, as the roll forming method mainly depends on the continuous bending deformation of the plate materials, the time and the cost of the heterogeneous materials developed in the process are relatively large when considered from the viewpoint of plastic working because many processes are continuously implemented. The existing studies on roll forming manufacturing have reported the loss of large amounts of time and materials when the raw materials or product types were changed; further, they have stated that the use of this method can hardly guarantee the uniformity of the formed shapes and the consistency in terms of size and cannot detect all the defects occurring during the mass production and related to the dimensions. Therefore, in this research, a real-time process data-based smart roll forming method that can be applied to multiple products was studied. As a result, a roll forming system was implemented that remembers and automatically sets the changes in the finely adjusted values of the supplied quantities of individual heterogeneous materials so that the equipment setting changing time for heterogeneous material replacements or changes in the products being produced can be shortened. It also secures the uniformity of the products so that more competitive and precise slide-rail products can be mass-produced with improvements in the quality, price, and productivity of the products.