Rigid Plastic FEM Model of Fast Solution to Strip Rolling

Abstract

Rigid plastic finite element method (RPFEM) is one of the most efficient numerical methods during the rolling process. Realizing FEM online application has been main target for many researchers. The influence of compile method, elements number, compressible parameter, friction factor and convergent criteria were investigated and RPFEM model of fast solution to strip rolling was proposed in this work. Compile method and compressible parameter have less influence on calculated rolling force. However, the iteration steps are reduced and computational efficiency is improved greatly with compile method of release and compressible parameter 0.01. The change of calculated rolling force becomes less but iteration steps become more and more with the increment of elements number. Both accuracy and efficiency is satisfying with the change of elements number from 50 to 200. In addition, the typical rolling schedule from a certain plant has been solved with the developed program FFEM-2D by FORTRAN. The predicted rolling force has a good agreement with the measured value. The iteration steps change from 12 to 36 and computational time is less than 200(ms) with the model in one pass rolling. Therefore, the accuracy is satisfying and computational time fully meets the basic requirements of FEM online application. Keywords: Rolling; RPFEM; Fast solution; Computational time