ABSTRACT
Curved steel rectangular hollow sections are commonly produced by applying cold roller bending using roller machine on hot finished hollow sections. After cold bending, extensive residual stress was generated along the section walls. While the magnitude of residual stress caused by the roller bending process could produce sufficient effects on the member’s stability and buckling resistance, few studies have investigated its distribution in details. In this paper, a proper numerical modelling procedure is employed to simulate the cold bending process and predict the residual stress distribution of the section after bending. In addition, a parametric study is conducted to investigate the effects of some key parameters on the resulted residual stress distribution of the bended sections. Based on the results obtained from the parametric studies, a simple residual stress distribution model is proposed.
