Abstract

Steel wires are used for pre-stressing concrete structural units and for the construction of suspension bridges among other applications in civil engineering. The reverse bending and straightening of wires by rollers is employed as a routine quality check to detect laminations in wires. Experimental work on the reverse bending of wires and Finite Element (FE) simulation of bending of wires has been investigated previously but the simulation of the reverse bending and straightening of wire has not been studied in detail. Also, the FE simulation of the bending of wire round a mandrel reported in the literature was conducted by pinning the nodes on one end of the wire to the mandrel and applying a concentrated load to the free end of the wire to bend the wire, which does not replicate the bending process in practice. In this paper, three dimensional FE simulation of the reverse bending of steel wires conducted as a part of the research to investigate the effects of the combination of reverse bending and defects such as laminations and scratches on the wires is presented. It is demonstrated that the reverse bending simulation procedures employed are appropriate based on a good agreement with experimental results.

Key words: Steel wires, finite element (FE) simulation, reverse bending, lamination.