With the increasing demands placed on metal forming companies, and the growing complexity and variety of products that these companies produce, the simulation of forming processes is becoming an increasingly important field of study. Such simulations are used to control the quality of the final product at an early stage of the process development, and their flexibility allows businesses to quickly change process parameters, and evaluate the effect. For dimensioning of the forming tools, and to determine the process borders, understanding the acting loads is also important.

Roll forming is an industrial-scale process  for the manufacturing of a large number of profiles, and knowledge of the loads that occur in a roll forming process is crucial, in order that appropriate forming machines and drives can be selected. In roll forming simulations the verification of parameters based on material flow is the current cutting edge. Due to simplifications in the existing models – for example, missing roll compliance – numerical models cannot describe the profile–tool interaction sufficiently, and missing process data means a realistic output of loads in simulation is impossible. In order solve this problem, a research team from the Technische Universität Darmstadt has demonstrated a roll forming simulation with the possibility of determining realistic load parameters by means of experimental results.