3-D Simulation of H-Beam Multi-Pass Hot Rolling and Microstructure Evolution

In hot metal forming processes, the material is subjected to the thermo-mechanical processing. A fully three dimensional thermo-mechanically coupled FEM-simulation of an eleven pass hot rough rolling process of H-beam has been performed. Microstructure evolution equations available in literatures were incorporated into the commercial FE solver ABAQUS/Explicit, through user defined subroutine VUMAT, to simulate the microstructure evolution. Since it’s impractical to obtain the austenite grain size distribution in the beam blank during industrial hot rolling, the calculated rolling loads are compared with the mills loads instead of grain size comparison between the predicted average value and the real ones.