Thermomechanical behaviours of strip and work-rolls in cold rolling process

Abstract

A finite element analysis was developed to determine thermomechanical behaviours of strip and work-roll during cold rolling process under practical rolling conditions. The velocity field was first obtained using a rigid-plastic finite element formulation and then it was used to assess the strain and stress distributions within the strip and at the same time, a thermal finite element model based on streamline upwind Petrov–Galerkin scheme was employed to predict temperature distribution within the metal being rolled. In the next stage, the predicted temperature and stress fields at the contact region of strip/work-roll were employed as the boundary conditions to evaluate the thermomechanical behaviour of the work-roll while the effect of back-up rolls was also considered in the mechanical part of the analysis. The model is shown to provide a proper insight for studying the deformation of strip and work-roll during high speed cold rolling process with a relatively low computational cost.