Development of simulation system for large H-beam hot rolling based on ABAQUS

Abstract

H-beam is a kind of efficient economic cross-section steel with wide flange and thin web. Due to the superior cross-section properties and reasonable strength-to-weight ratio benefiting from its especial shape, H-beam has been widely used in the industry and building trade. However, since the hot rolling of large H-beam is a highly nonlinear plastic deformation process which happens under the high temperature and high pressure, the real-time detection of internal information for H-beam and deformable roller in the rolling process is difficult to be realized. The finite element simulation is an effective measure to demonstrate the internal information during the whole hot rolling process. However, the drastic plastic deformation involved in the transient rolling process may lead to meshing distortion in simulation which would result into inaccurate simulation results. In this paper, the finite element simulation system for large H-beam hot rolling is developed based on ABAQUS and thermal coupled elastic-plastic finite element method by customizing applications and embedding re-meshing algorithm and subroutines. Modeling of pre-processing and extracting simulation results of post-processing can be automatically achieved through the simulation system. The re-meshing algorithm and the information transfer method of the clearance between two passes are synthetically used to ensure the continuous simulation of multi-pass hot rolling process and improve the accuracy of simulation results. The validity of the simulation system developed in this paper is verified through measuring the temperature field in hot rolling process of HN900x300 using a thermal infrared imager. The results show that the simulation results of the system are coincident with the measured results with errors below 6 %.