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Description
Industry 4.0 promotes the use of digital twins to improve manufacturing efficiency. In this paper we report work being carried out at the NISCO-UK Research Centre at the University of Leicester, UK, looking at steel plates manufacturing. Physics-based models of the production of slabs by continuous casting and subsequent rolling are used to further improve the understanding of the impact of Key Process Variables on the formation of defects such as linear cracking and abnormal grain structures.
The continuous casting model takes into account liquid steel flow within the slab, solidification of the steel and the mechanical effect of the rolls acting on the slab as it is being cast. The rolling model include the modelling of the pre-heating and its resulting temperature distribution, followed by the thermomechanical modelling of the slab as it is being rolled.
As an example, a slab of thickness 160mm is produced using a continuous caster, then rolled to a final thickness of 40mm. Some variations of the KPVs are then considered and their impacts on process outcome highlighted.