Integrated Design Exploration of Materials, Products, and Manufacturing Processes Using Goal-Oriented, Inverse Design Method

Steel manufacturers focus on developing new grades of steel with improved properties and performance. The careful managing of material processing during steel manufacturing will lead to the development of steels with a range of mechanical properties resulting in the improved performance of products. A round rod is produced after passing the raw steel through several manufacturing processes such as casting, reheating, rolling, and cooling. This round rod forms the input material for gear production. The chemical composition of the steel including the segregation of alloying elements, the deformation history during rolling, the cooling after rolling, and the microstructure generated define the end properties of the rolled product. The presence of large numbers of design variables, constraints and bounds, conflicting goals, and sequential information/material flow during material processing makes the steel rod making process chain highly complex. Many plant trials are therefore required to produce a new steel grade with desired properties and performance. These trials are usually expensive and time-consuming. An alternative is to carry out simulation-based, integrated design exploration of the different manufacturing processes involved in exploiting the advances in computational modeling and identifying a ranged set of solutions that satisfy the requirements, both of the steel manufacturing process and the end rod product.