FE Simulation Of Rail Rolling Process

With the rapid development of China’s economic construction, the existing rail transportation has been far from satisfying the people’s growing sense of convenient, fast and secure travel needs. A high speed, overloading and automation modernization with Chinese characteristics railway will be the future of China’s railway development. FE software MSC.Marc is used to study the rail rolling process.Changes and distributions of deformation, force, temperature and stress-strain of the billet in the BD2 rolling process of 60kg/m rail is studied with three-dimensional mechanical-thermal coupled elastic-plastic FE models. Rail rolling process is a metallic high-temperature plastic working process and a nonlinear problem with material non-linearity, geometric non-linearity and boundary conditions non-linearity. Models are developed separately for the five passes of BD2 rolling process, The boundary conditions are set as the actual rolling conditions.Rolling tests of the whole rolling process were carried out and got the experiment results of temperature, deformation and rolling force. The good agreements between the simulation results and the experimental results prove the accuracy and reliability of the developed models.The FE model developed in this paper makes a foundation of further studying the rolling process, designing and optimizing new products and new rolling technology with simulation method.