Incremental ring rolling to create conical profile rings

A key application for ring rolled products used in turbomachinery and other engineering machines are components which take the form of a hollow truncated cone, or 'conical profile'. These are currently rolled close to net-shape shape using expensive part specific tooling or cut from a simple rectangular cross-section rolled ring. In this paper, efforts to create conical profiles by a novel 'incremental ring rolling' process are described. Three types of conical profile which require challenging redistribution of material throughout the workpiece were targeted: an inner taper, outer taper and a flanged cone. Experiments carried out on lead workpieces suggest that such profiles are attainable by constrained incremental ring rolling and defects such as underfilling (outer taper and flanged cone), dishing (inner taper) and unwanted conicity (inner taper) can be reduced. Ultimately this could be exploited to either save material and machining time or reduce tooling costs. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the International Conference on the Technology of Plasticity.