Strain-Induced Ferrite Formation During Steckel Mill Simulations with Varying Roughing Pass Schedules

It has been previously demonstrated that austenite may undergo partial dynamic transformation (DT) during the plate rolling process. Austenite dynamically transforms into unstable ferrite during hot deformation even at very high temperatures. In this work, the plate rolling simulations, with emphasis on Steckel mill operations, through torsion testing under isothermal conditions were performed on an X70 steel. Four different roughing schedules were tested followed by five finishing passes with pass strains of 0.3 applied at 900 °C. The roughing schedules had zero, one, two and three roughing passes at a temperature of 1100 °C, strain of 0.4 and strain rate of 1 s−1. The stress–strain curves as well as the mean flow stress (MFS) behaviors indicated that both dynamic transformation (DT) and dynamic recrystallization (DRX) occurred during straining. The critical strains for the onset of DT and DRX were determined by means of the double differentiation method and the critical strain values decreased with the number of roughing and finishing strains from the first going to the last pass. It was observed that the volume fraction of the dynamically formed ferrite increased sharply during the finishing stage as the number of previous roughing passes increased, which can be attributed to higher strain accumulation. The results presented here indicate that improved models are needed to control the microstructure of the material during subsequent cooling.