Optimal Cluster Mill Pass Scheduling With an Accurate and Rapid New Strip Crown Model
- Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Wright State University, 3640 Col. Glenn Hwy., Dayton, OH 45435 (United States)
- Intergrated Industrial Systems, Inc., 475 Main St., Yalesville, CT 06492 (United States)
Besides the requirement to roll coiled sheet at high levels of productivity, the optimal pass scheduling of cluster-type reversing cold mills presents the added challenge of assigning mill parameters that facilitate the best possible strip flatness. The pressures of intense global competition, and the requirements for increasingly thinner, higher quality specialty sheet products that are more difficult to roll, continue to force metal producers to commission innovative flatness-control technologies. This means that during the on-line computerized set-up of rolling mills, the mathematical model should not only determine the minimum total number of passes and maximum rolling speed, it should simultaneously optimize the pass-schedule so that desired flatness is assured, either by manual or automated means. In many cases today, however, on-line prediction of strip crown and corresponding flatness for the complex cluster-type rolling mills is typically addressed either by trial and error, by approximate deflection models for equivalent vertical roll-stacks, or by non-physical pattern recognition style models. The abundance of the aforementioned methods is largely due to the complexity of cluster-type mill configurations and the lack of deflection models with sufficient accuracy and speed for on-line use. Without adequate assignment of the pass-schedule set-up parameters, it may be difficult or impossible to achieve the required strip flatness. In this paper, we demonstrate optimization of cluster mill pass-schedules using a new accurate and rapid strip crown model. This pass-schedule optimization includes computations of the predicted strip thickness profile to validate mathematical constraints. In contrast to many of the existing methods for on-line prediction of strip crown and flatness on cluster mills, the demonstrated method requires minimal prior tuning and no extensive training with collected mill data. To rapidly and accurately solve the multi-contact problem and predict the strip crown, a new customized semi-analytical modeling technique that couples the Finite Element Method (FEM) with classical solid mechanics was developed to model the deflection of the rolls and strip while under load. The technique employed offers several important advantages over traditional methods to calculate strip crown, including continuity of elastic foundations, non-iterative solution when using predetermined foundation moduli, continuous third-order displacement fields, simple stress-field determination, and a comparatively faster solution time.
- OSTI ID:
- 21057327
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 908, Issue 1; Conference: NUMIFORM '07: 9. international conference on numerical methods in industrial forming processes, Porto (Portugal), 17-21 Jun 2007; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.2740948; (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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