Modeling and Simulation of Steel Rolling with Microstructure Evolution: An Overview

As part of rolled steel's design and optimization, computational modeling and simulation are increasingly applied for predicting the properties and microstructure of final steel products. The time and cost of resorting to traditional trial‐and‐error‐based methods can be significantly reduced using the computational method. Among the numerical approaches, the finite‐element (FE) method has been customarily utilized in various cold and hot rolling processes over the years for its numerical efficiency and precision. The rolling process involves a thermomechanical–metallurgical phenomenon, and thus the interdisciplinary coupling of these is a challenge to rolling simulation and modeling the scientific community. Herein, recent studies on FE modeling for predicting rolled shape, microstructural, and mechanical properties, among others, in steel rolling are extensively reviewed. An overview of the recent progress of the computational methods in multiscale computational architecture, which models the microstructural evolution and phase transformation by various sources, is particularly highlighted.