Development of dislocation based-unified material model for simulating microstructure evolution in multipass hot rolling

Dynamic recrystallization and recovery are two competing processes. Both may continue after hot deformation, such as during passes in multipass hot rolling processes, reducing dislocation density of materials and allowing larger plastic deformation to be achieved. The main objective of this research is to develop a set of mechanism-based unified viscoplastic constitutive equations which model the evolution of dislocation density, recrystallization and grain size during and after hot plastic deformation. This set of constitutive equations are determined for a C-Mn steel using an evolutionary programming (EP) optimization technique and implemented into the commercial finite element (FE) solver ABAQUS for process simulations. Numerical procedures to simulate multipass rolling are developed. FE analysis is carried out to simulate the evolution of grain size, dynamic/static recrystallization and recovery, and to rationalize their effects on the viscoplastic flow of the material in a two-pass hot rolling process.