Design of rolling pass schedules to improve grain-size uniformity in thickness

Among various methods to achieve high strength in plain carbon steel, the method of grain refinement by controlling thermo-mechanical processing parameters has gained a great attention in steel rolling industries. In the present study, three different rolling pass schedules for thick plates are proposed to obtain fine and uniform grains through thickness, based on combined analyses of recrystallization modeling, finite element analysis and experiments. Since meta-dynamic and dynamic recrystallization have been found to be effective in producing fine grains, the reduction ratio and the interpass time were carefully considered in the proposed rolling pass schedules.