Development Of The Finite Element Simulation System For Large H-beam Hot Rolling

H-beam derived from joist steel is one kind of multi-purpose, efficient and economical sectional steel with wide flange, thin web. Because of its excellent mechanics feature, H-beam is widely used in national economic construction, such as bridges, plant, high-rise buildings, petrochemical industry, port and the subway project. The hot rolling of large H-beam is a highly non-linear plastic deformation process under the high temperature and high pressure, and the internal information for workpiece and deformable roller in rolled process can not be obtained in real time because of the hot environment. At present, the finite element method has been widely used to simulate in the hot rolling process of H-beam. On account of universality of commercial finite element software and complexity of hot rolling process, the job in pre-processing, post-processing and re-meshing is hard to completed smoothly. In order to solve the above problems, an finite element simulation system for hot rolled large H-beam is developed in this paper. Through the simulation system, modeling in pre-processing and extracting simulation results in post-processing can be achieved automatically, which is significant to the majorization of hot rolled process and development of new H-beam.Taking the typical models of large H-beam in Laiwu Iron&Steel Group Co., LTD as example, an three-dimensional elastic-plastic finite element model coupled thermal mechanical is founded to simulate the whole hot rolled process including hi-pressure water descaling, rough rolling, finish rolling and cooling based on the Standard and Explicit solver of ABAQUS, in which the re-meshing technique is used to solve the problem of mesh distortion.The finite element simulation system for hot rolled large H-beam is developed by customizing applications of secondary development for ABAQUS, in which the re-meshing scripts written by Python and subroutines written by Fortran including VUMAT, VFRIC, FILM and USDFLD are embedded to solve the nonlinear problem such as geometric nonlinearity, material nonlinearity and boundary nonlinearity. The process parameters can be input or selected in customizing graphical user interface, which achieve interaction between users and simulation system kernel automatically.The rollers are made as deformable body innovatively in simulation system to research the metal flowing law and temperature field of workpiece, as well as the strength situation and deformation regularity through the post-processing customizing graphical user interface. The simulation system is verified through comparing the temperature field between simulation results and field data collected by TH5104infrared thermometer.The simulation system can improve the efficiency of optimizing hot rolled production process parameters observably, shorten the development cycle of developing new H-beam greatly, and provide some valuable references to the product defect analysis, equipment failure analysis and improvement and optimization of the rolling mill. Inaddition, the simulation method and secondary development technology of ABAQUS can also be used to research other large deformation plastic forming process.