Development of an industrial ferritic rolling process for IF grade steel

Abstract

Interstitial free (IF) grade steels have high transformation temperatures and often results in non-uniform rolling and lower yields. In the present work, industrial ferritic rolling process is developed, where finish rolling is carried out below the Ar1 temperature for the IF grade steel. Offline simulation was carried out using a hot strip mill model (HSMM) software and full-scale ferritic rolling was carried out in a seven-stand hot strip mill under two different finishing and coiling temperatures and compared with austenitic rolling. Furnace drop-out temperature, mill speed and inter-stand cooling were controlled to achieve the desired low rolling temperatures. Both ferritic rolled coils had strained elongated grains and well-developed alpha (<110>//RD) and gamma (<111>//ND) textures. The lower finishing and coiling temperature processed coil shows higher microstructural and textural variation along with the thickness. This work established the optimum parameters for the industrial ferritic rolling process for IF grade steel.