Developing a Two-roll Wire Straightener

Wire straightening is essential for obtaining a piece of straight wire from a roll of wire stock. The objectives of this research were to develop a two-roll wire straightener and find the appropriate roll gap and roll angle for the straightener based on the finite element analysis results. A PLC was employed as the main controller to control motors that adjust the parameters. An image acquisition and processing unit were also built to obtain the deformation of the aluminum wire offline. The wire used in the study is a 1050 series aluminum wire with a length of 400 mm and a diameter of 2.98 mm. Three wires were analyzed with initial deformations of 5.0 mm, 7.5 mm, and 10.0 mm. Full factorial experiments of the straightening process were simulated using the finite element analysis. Then, a two-way analysis of variance was performed on experimental data. Subsequently, the straightening parameters with the smallest residual deformation were adopted as the optimal parameters for the wire straightener. Using the parameters found in this study can improve the residual deformation by over 90%.