Simulation of the Hot Ring Rolling Process by Using a Thermo-Coupled Three-Dimensional Rigid-Viscoplastic Finite Element Method

During hot metal forming, the temperature variation and plastic deformation affect each other considerably. In the present investigation, ring rolling of hot steel is simulated by using a three-dimensional thermo-coupled rigid-viscoplastic finite element method. A new term is added to the functional in the variational approach to consider the influence of the frictional torque of the mandrel bearing, and the coupled thermal-mechanical simulation is performed by the iteration between the rigid-viscoplastic finite element analysis and the thermal finite element analysis. Since the deformation region and the severe temperature changes are restricted to the vicinity of the roll gap, only a ring segment and parts of the rolls are analyzed using a steady-state treatment to save computation time. Roll force and torque, width spread, temperature distributions, the distributions of strain and strain rate and the distributions of relative velocity and stress at the roll surfaces are obtained. The results show that the angular velocity of the driven roll has a significant influence on the temperature variations in the ring and the rolls, to which attention should be paid in the design of the process. The method presented can also be used to analyze other forming processes such as unsymmetrical plate rolling, symmetric rolling, and extrusion.