Influence of Strain Rate on Interpass Softening During the Simulated Warm Rolling of Interstitial-Free Steels

Most laboratory simulations of hot rolling involve a scaling down of the strain rate from the much higher industrial levels. This leads to slower softening between each rolling pass, for which corrections must be made. In the present work, torsion testing simulations of “warm” rod rolling were conducted on a Ti-Nb interstitial-free (IF) steel at 840 °C and 770 °C(i.e., in the ferrite range). For this purpose, “strain rate corrected” interpass times were used, in addition to the more familiar corrections for the stress. The results are compared with those obtained from simulations using uncorrected industrial interpass times. At 840 °C, simulations using corrected interpass times led to high levels of softening between the stages of rolling, thus triggering the reinitiation of cycles of dynamic recrystallization. The initially high stress level at the start of these cycles was responsible for the large differences in the pass-to-pass mean flow stress behavior, compared with that observed when using uncorrected industrial interpass times, or continuous deformations. The differences were much less pronounced at 770 °C, where the rate of softening is much slower than at 840 °C. Predictions for softening based on the Avrami equation underestimated the softening observed using the continuous and uncorrected industrial interpass time schedules and overestimated it for the corrected ones. The former is due to the occurrence of recovery, which is not addressed by the Avrami relation, while the latter is due to the precipitation that takes place during the corrected (longer) interpass times. It was also found that simulations using continuous deformations are applicable only if the interpass softening that would be expected using the corrected interpass times does not exceed about 20 pct.