Study on the manufacturing process of precision linear guide rail through shape rolling and shape drawing

Abstract

Guide rails are one of the most important components in terms of equipment because the quality of the linear rail in-fluences on the precision linear motion. For long rails used in the guide rail, high dimensional accuracy as well as a cross-sectional shape is required. As a production method of guide rail, drawing process is mainly used. But, the shape rolling process is open used for the pre-process of the other metal forming process such as forging, extrusion, and shape drawing. The shape rolling process is one of the most effective processes which can make long products with constant irregular cross-sectional shape. Therefore, the tool shape is a very important process variable to obtain the required final product. The objective of this paper is the design of roll shape of the rolling process to produce the initial material with irregular cross sectional shape for shape drawing. Also, the die shape of the drawing process is determined to satisfy the dimensional accuracy of the final product. In this study, FE-analysis and artificial neural network (ANN) were applied to achieve the objective. Further, shape rolling and shape drawing experiments were performed to verify the result of FE-analysis. From results, it was possible to design the roll shape of shape rolling process effectively.