Patent ID: 7421381

Claim:
A design support method of supporting a design of a conveying path by performing simulation of a behavior of a sheet-shaped flexible medium being conveyed in said conveying path, comprising: a conveying condition setting step of setting a conveying condition of a conveying roller for conveying said flexible medium; a roller nip calculation step of preparing a two-dimensional finite element model of a conveying roller pair including said conveying roller and calculating deformation of said conveying roller in a nip portion of said conveying roller pair; a motion calculating step of calculating the behavior of said flexible medium in a time-series manner on the basis of the deformation of said conveying roller calculated in said roller nip calculating step regarding where a portion of said flexible medium is nipped by said conveying roller pair having said two-dimensional finite element model prepared in said roller nip calculating step without preparing said two-dimensional finite element model for the portion outside of said nip portion of said conveying roller pair where said flexible medium is not nipped by said conveying roller pair having said two-dimensional finite element model prepared in said roller nip calculating step; and an outputting step of outputting the behavior of said flexible medium obtained in said motion calculating step, wherein said roller nip calculation step determines a posture of said flexible medium in said nip portion of said conveying roller pair by extracting coordinate values of plural node points representing a peripheral surface of said conveying roller of said two-dimensional finite element model in a sectional plane perpendicular to a direction along which said conveying roller is stretched and by obtaining an approximate curve on the basis of the coordinate values of said plural node points representing the peripheral surface of said conveying roller to define a shape of said nip portion as a part of said conveying path.