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Acta Metall. Sin. (Engl. Lett.) Vol. 20 No. 5 pp380-384 Oct. 2007

ACTA METALLURGICA SINICA (ENGLISH LETTERS) www.arns,org.cn

SIMULATION OF 3-D DEFORMATION AND MATERIAL FLOW DURING ROLL FORGING PROCESS USING SYSTEM OF OVAL-ROUND GROOVE
G . H . Liu1S2)*, G . S . Red), and C.G. Xu')
1) Beijing Research Institute of Mechanical & Electrical Technology, Beijing 100083, China 2) Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China Manuscript received 8 June 2007

Basing on the analysis of the traits of the roll forging process, a system-model of computer simulation has been established. Three-dimensional rigid-plastic FEM has been used for the simulation of the deformation process in the oval and round pass rolling, including the entering, rolling, and separating stages. The analysis was conducted using the Deform-3D ver.5.0 code. The important information concerned with the deformution area characteristic,material flow, and velocity field has been presented. Otherwise,the location of the neutral plane in the deformation area was shown clearly. KEY WORDS numerical simulation; 3-0 deformation; roll forging

1. Introduction
Roll forging is a process for reducing the cross-sectional area of heated bars or billets by passing them between two driven rolls that rotate in opposite directions and have one or more matching grooves in each roll['].This process reduces the cross-sectional area of the bar while changing its shape. It is a very cost effective and property effective process that can be applied as a final forming operation or a preliminary forming operation, followed by other forging processes in components manufacture, such as hand shovels, spades, various agricultural tools, crankshafts connecting rods, and other automotive parts. Nowadays, products for various fields in practice have to meet higher quality demands and need to be developed in shorter times. The design and optimization of the forming processes are often done by employees based on their operational experience. Therefore, it is often necessary to carry out experiments that are very expensive because of high machinery costs and loss of production[21. To prevent such empiric procedure, numerical simulation of the forming processes is applied increasingly and is becoming a very important tool for the design and development of new products. En the 2 I" century, computer simulation has become an important trend of plastic forming[31. It can be used not only to prove the feasibility of the
'Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 10 82415013; fax: +86 10 62933753. E-mail address: huamary20OO@yahoo.corn.cn (G.H. Liu)

production process, but also to show the deformation behavior inside the workpiece. Thus, several researchers have engaged in the numerical description of the forming procesP". Recently, with the development of the available software, various hot-forming processes can be studied by FEM (finite element method) sim~lation[~-~]. Researchers have already built the models and completed the simulation during the hot Roll forging process using the FEM program MSC Marc[''] and other FEM software["]. Although the principle involved in reducing the cross-sectional area of the work metal in roll forging is essentially the same as that employed in rolling mills to reduce billets to bars, the forming process in roll forging with its own characteristic is complicated; only using the principle employed in rolling mills is inadequate and further research is necessary. In this study, the simulation of the deformation during the roll forging process using the oval-round groove-system is shown and the results are discussed.

2. Conditions of the Simulation

The subject of the simulation is forming a shaft with 30mm diameter using a roll forging machine in which the center distance is 460mm. The material of the billet is No.45 steel; its initial cross-section diameter is 40mm, and its length is 160mm. To shape such a shaft, two rolling passes using the oval-round groove system are selected, and then forging dies are designed based on the total coefficient of elongation. The cross-section shape and dimensions of the grooves are shown in Fig. 1. Along the length, the die is combined with three arc-stages called entering, steady-rolling, and separating, and the center angle of each is 5", 20, and 5", respectively. The workpiece is deformed from a round bar to an elliptical one in the first pass, and then enters the second pass after rotating 90" around its axis.
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Fig. 1 Cross-section dimensions of grooves for roll forging: (a) oval groove; (b) round groove (unit: mm).

3. FEMModel
Using a rigid-plastic material law, the isothermal 3-D simulation of the roll forging process was performed using the commercial software Deform-3D Ver 5.0. The flow stress of the material (a steel with approximately 0.45wt% C) is the function of the accumulated strain, the instantaneous strain rate, and the current temperature, which can be read directly from the materials in the software. For the calculation of the friction stress, the law of constant friction (the friction factor model), which assumes a proportionality between the friction stress and the shear yield stress, was used.

The geometry of the objects (two dies, a workpiece) is imported from the Solidworks-interface. The dies are defined as rigid objects while the workpiece is discretized and defined as a plastic one. In the simulation, the dies rotate around the axis of each roller in the opposition direction with 65rev/min. The dies and the workpiece can be seen in Fig.2 during the simulation of the second rolling pass. During the simulation, the mesh of the workpiece was regenerated by the automatic tetrahedron Fig.2 Simulation model of the second rolling pass. remesher of Deform-3D, which is necessary owing to the high deformation of the elements. The remeshing parameters must be appropriately chosen. The calculation was accomplished with a total number of elements of about 11000.

4. Analysis and Discussion of the Simulation Results 4.1 Simulation of the 3D-defomzation
According to the simulation results in Fig.3, the deformation of the workpiece during the roll forging process either in oval groove or in round groove includes three stages called entering, steady-state rolling, and separating, which are usually divided into steady-state and unsteady-state rolling processes. At the beginning, the workpiece contacts the dies only on its top and bottom, and is then driven into the groove by the friction between the rollers and the billet; this stage is not steady while the deformation is slow and gradual. After a short transition, the rolling process is in the steady-state stage in which the main

Fig.3 Deformation shape of the workpiece in oval (a-c) and round (d-f) pass rolling at several stages: (a, d) entering; (b, e) steady-state rolling; (c, f) separating.

deformation is completed. At the end, with the workpiece separating from the groove in the dies, the process is in unsteady-state stage again. The reason for this is that the contact area between the dies and the workpiece in the steady state is considerably larger than that in the beginning and the end. Unlike mill rolling, the deformation along the length direction of the workpiece is confined during roll forging process. The workpiece does not enter the groove on its head; there is a certain distance between the head and the contact location. At the tail of the workpiece, the condition is similar. Thus, neither the section of the head nor that of the tail is concave, as shown in Figs. 3a and c.

4.2 Simulation of the velocity field

Fig.4 shows the simulation of the velocity field in the deformation zone along the rolling direction. It is clear that the velocity of each element is not equal either in oval groove or in round groove. Line G in Fig.4a and line H in Fig.4b are regarded as the interfaces; on the right of them, the speed of the elements near the sides is slower than those near the middle; on the left of them, the result is just the opposite. Thus, lines G and H represent the neutral planes, which divide the deformation area into forward slip and backward slip. Since the max reduction of the workpiece in round groove (about 18mm) is slightly heavier than that in oval groove (about 16mm), the distribution of the elements' speed in the cross section is not considerably different in the two kinds groove.

Fig.4 Velocity field in oval and round pass rolling at steady-state during roll forging: (a) in oval groove; (b) in round groove.

6. Conclusions
Using the finite element method numerical simulation, 3-D dynamic deformation simulation in oval and round grooves during the roll forging process including entering, rolling, and separating stages has been completed. The complete information of the workpiece deformation shape, the velocity field, and the material flow trait are obtained. The location of the neutral plane in the deformation area has been predicted correctly and clearly.

Acknowledgements-This

work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation o f China

(No.

50675014).

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