Investigation of rolls size effects on hot ring rolling process by coupled thermo-mechanical 3D-FEA

Hot ring rolling is a significant branch of ring rolling characterized by high nonlinearity, 3D deformation, continuously progressive forming, unsteady-state, asymmetry, etc. with coupled thermo-mechanical behaviors which have significant effects on the deformation behavior, microstructure and mechanical properties of the ring. Changing the sizes of forming rolls including mandrel and driver rolls will considerably affect the roll gap deformation zone which is in close relation to the feed amount of both forming rolls and thus affects forming quality of the ring as well as power parameters. In this study, a reliable coupled thermo-mechanical and 3D rigid-plastic finite-element (FE) model for hot rolling of large rings is established. Then, based on the stable forming condition of the ring rolling process and comprehensive numerical simulations, the size effects of forming rolls on strain and temperature distributions and their uniformity, stress distribution, side spread and power parameters were investigated by 3D coupled thermo-mechanical FE simulation. The results show that there are optimum sizes of mandrel and driver rolls under which the strain and temperature distributions of ring and thus its microstructure are the most uniform where fishtail coefficient and power parameters have reasonable values. The achievements obtained can not only serve as a guide to the design of rolls sizes, optimization and quality control of the hot ring rolling process, but also clarify the plastic deformation and heat transferring of hot rolling of large rectangular-section rings.