Prediction of distortion during cooling of steel rolled rings using thermal-mechanical-metallurgical finite element model

This work takes place in the framework of a CRAFT European project gathering three universities, three companies who produce rings through the ring rolling process and a manufacturer of temperature and dimension measurement devices.
The final goal of the project is to develop and set up a system, integrated in the industrial process, capable of predicting the geometrical characteristics of final pieces just after the ring rolling stage and to allow the rolling process to avoid dimensional defects through online adaption. In fact, ring rolling production does not imply only the rolling process, but also the cooling and quench stages of steel rings. During all these phases, the dimensions of the pieces change dramatically. In particular, due to the lack of symmetry in the cooling conditions, ring distortions include contraction and rotation of the ring section. The modeling of the cooling phase requires taking into account a large number of phenomena resulting from the coupling of thermal,
mechanical and metallurgical effects. A numerical model has been implemented in the non-linear finite element code LAGAMINE, developed by the University of Liège. Such a model can help to better understand the evolution of the geometry during the cooling phase and also the effects of each physical and microstructural parameter implemented in the model on the ring final shape. Effectively, several parameters can affect the ring distortions and the model should take them into account; in particular, the mechanical and thermal behavior of each phase present in the material (metastable austenite, ferrite, pearlite, bainite and martensite). Phase transformation modeling implies the integration of a wide data base of material properties (thermo-physical and mechanical properties of the phases, TTT and CCT diagrams, enthalpy and strain of phase transformation, strain of transformation plasticity…) but only a few of these data are available in literature. Some of them have been found for the reference material (42CrMo4 steel), but additional laboratory experiments have been performed at the Universities of Padua and Liège in order to characterize thermal, mechanical and plastic behaviour of phases. Finally, this paper presents the model validation on an industrial case (measurements of temperature and dimensions of rings have been provided by the manufacturer). Then, some applications are presented, demonstrating the importance of some factors such as some material properties, the shape of the rings, the type of cooling (and the cooling rate) or the symmetry of the cooling scheme on final ring distortion.