Texture control in asymmetric rolling for improved sheet metal formability.

Background
Today material producers face many challenges: rising energy costs, environmental restrictions and ever more stringent customer demands for improved properties and quality. In particular metal producers in Europe face shrinking profit margins on conventional products, e.g. rolled steels and alloys, due to competition from producers in developing economies benefiting from lower cost bases. Thus it is imperative that European producers diversify and develop what are referred to asadvanced materials: materials which have high added-value compared toconventional counterparts or are specifically application engineered [1]. A keystone in the success of this endeavour is the discovery anddevelopment of innovative production techniques. The power of computational hardware and the sophistication of physics based materials science modelling tools have now reached the point that effective research of such new production technologies can be largely carried out through high accuracy simulation [2]. This project proposes to exploit a pioneering physics-based material computational framework to research a promising and innovative processing technique.

Problem Statement
A new material processing technique, cold asymmetric rolling (ASR), hasbeen recently found to be capable of producing sheet alloys with significantly improved properties, by introducing new beneficial crystallographic textures into the material. There are encouraging recent results forenhanced formability of aluminium alloys, and magnetisation properties for steels [35]. The process is additionally attractive to industry as it closely related to conventional rolling. ASR cannot yet be developed in an industrial context due to some fundamental problems:

 * the evolution of deformation fields, texture and microstructure during ASR
   is not understood [6, 7]
 * the process may produce strong heterogeneity in properties such as grain
   orientation, size and shape [8]. This could significantly impact subsequent
   forming behaviour but the causes, specific consequences and a means of control
   are not yet known [9, 10].
 * it is not known how the process parameters influence resulting material
   properties, nor how the process might be optimised it is not yet clearly known
   how properties developed during ASR are modified by subsequent annealing
   (crucial for aluminium alloys)

In essence this project aims to gain scientific insight and find solutions to the above problems by constructing and validating a high accuracy model of the ASR process; specifically it will build on recent fundamental research on (i) ASR and modelling of annealing conducted by the Materials Science and Engineering group at Ghent University (e.g. [11]) and (ii) high efficiency texture evolution and heterogeneous deformation modelling conducted by group ASTRO at MTM KU Leuven, where collaboration with the Scientific Computing group at KU Leuven has resulted ina pioneering computational framework [12] and state-of-the-art physics based plasticity and texture models [13, 14].


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