3. Verification
Spoorenberg et al. [12] tried to bend a straight H-beam into a
desired curved beam in the strong axis direction, as shown in Fig. 7.
By using finite element analysis (FEA), they estimated residual
stress, curvature distribution and the relationship between the displacement
of the right hand roller and arch radius. It is reasonable
to assume that the bending process is a reversed application of the
leveling process. Therefore, the results obtained from this study
can be used to verify the validity of the proposed analytical model
and computational procedure. It is found that the curvature distribution
of proposed model in the leveling area, as shown in Fig. 8,
matches well with the FEM result by Spoorenberg et al. Fig. 9
shows the trajectory distribution of section A-A. The displacement
of the right hand roller is 31 mm. But the end of the vertical coordinate
of the H-beamis a bit less than 31mm. The reason is that the difference
equals R(1 − cos θ2) + R(1 − cos θ3), as shown in Eq. (8).
Besides, Figs. 10 and 11 also show the comparison graphs of the
right hand roller versus the final constant radius for HE 100A with
different yield stresses. It can be seen that the results from the
proposed method are in close agreement with Spoorenberg et al.'s
experimental data.