data M Software GmbH has developed powerful and effective TQM products for roll forming companies. These are: COPRA RollForm Software for the design of profiles, tubes and their respective rolls, COPRA RollScanner for verifying the quality of rolls and for re-engineering and COPRA FEA RF for Finite Element Analysis. Here is a description of each of the TQM products for roll formers: 1A. COPRA RollForm Design Software The COPRA Professional Tube Mill Roll Design Center is the advanced software package for tube mill roll design and is tailored to the needs of makers of round and rectangular tubes or pipes. It includes features such as project manager, database archiving, machine data setup, setup for forming methods (circular, 2-radius, W-forming, 4-radius, oval and oth-ers), forming strategy setup, setup of forming para-meters, roll design setup, automatic flower design, automatic roll design and parametric roll modification. Common types of tube weld-ing lines and respective types of forming and calibration passes are already stored in COPRA 's database and can easily be extended, copied or modified according to the users needs. The calculation of the roll forming steps is done according to predefined strategies and can be adapted to individual require-ments. COPRA 's design functions are fully parametric. User friendly dialogue boxes allow easy access to the most effective functionality. COPRA not only creates the flower, but all the tooling as well. It stores all the parameters required for a proper tube mill roll setup and presents them in user-friendly dialogue boxes (with self-explaining figures) to the operator. COPRA also allows for the automatic and parametric design of roller tools. Currently, optimized forming (down-hill forming) can only be calculated by COPRA. It allows to predict and optimize forming sequences. The COPRA Professional Design Module for Shaped Tubes allows you to calculate calibrating passes from round tubes to special shapes. 1B. COPRA DTM (Deformation Technology Module) which allows for a quick optimisation of a roll form design in a first step even before starting a high-end FEA calculation. This 2-step simulation loop accelerates the common iteration process in tool development drastically compared to the sole use of FEA technology. At the show it will be shown in a redesigned version which is able to calculate forces and strain values (for top, centre and bottom coil face) as well. This software module provides ma-chine- and roll form tool makers with essential information about material behaviour. 1C. COPRA FEA RF (Finite Element Analysis) is a new data M software module for the simulation and analysis of the roll forming process. It is based on an optimised MSC.MARC solver and the result of almost 10 years research and development at data M in the field of roll form analysis cal-culation. The non-linear elasto plastic calculation, the automatically gen-erated model, a process-wizard driven easy definition of re-spective process parameters and reduced calculation time are making this solution to a virtual try-out mill. Very important is a professional analysis tool for an easy examination of the calculated result. It is not enough to see the defects in a coloured picture but to have respective functions to find the reason for the defects shown. Various graphs are visu-alising parameters like strain distribution, forming length and strip movement and give a comprehensive information on the quality that can be expected to the designer. This effective software tool is completed by data Ms: 1D. COPRA RollScanner an optical roll inspection machine which automatically gener-ates accurate CAD drawings from the existing roll tooling. These data files are being used in the COPRA FEA RF analysis software in order to perform troubleshooting or to optimise already existing tool sets for an improved and constant quality. The Total Quality System in the Design and Analysis of Roll Form Tooling described above has already been proved in a large number of industrial projects and is introduced to the Asian market at the TUBE Singapore exhibition, More info at: http://www.roll-design.com or http://www.datam.de

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