Thermomechanical behaviours of strip and work-rolls in cold rolling process

A finite element analysis was developed to determine thermomechanical behaviours of strip and work-roll during cold rolling process under practical rolling conditions. The velocity field was first obtained using a rigid-plastic finite element formulation and then it was used to assess the strain and stress distributions within the strip and at the same time, a thermal finite element model based on streamline upwind Petrov-Galerkin scheme was employed to predict temperature distribution within the metal being rolled. In the next stage, the predicted temperature and stress fields at the contact region of strip/work-roll were employed as the boundary conditions to evaluate the thermomechanical behaviour of the work-roll while the effect of back-up rolls was also considered in the mechanical part of the analysis. The model is shown to provide a proper insight for studying the deformation of strip and work-roll during high speed cold rolling process with a relatively low computational cost.