j ournal of materi als processi ng technology 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 9196

j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er . com/ l ocat e/ j mat pr ot ec

Deformation behavior of the surface defects of low carbon
steel in wire rod rolling
I.H. Son
a,
, J.D. Lee
b
, S. Choi
a
, D.L. Lee
a
, Y.T. Im
c
a
Wire Rod Research Group, Technical Research Laboratories, POSCO, 1, Goedong-dong, Nam-gu, Pohang,
Gyeongbuk 790-785, Republic of Korea
b
Steelmaking Research Group, Technical Research Laboratories, POSCO, 1, Goedong-dong, Nam-gu, Pohang, Gyeongbuk 790-785,
Republic of Korea
c
National Research Laboratory for Computer Aided Materials Processing, Department of Mechanical Engineering, ME3227, Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 373-1, Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea
a r t i c l e i n f o
Keywords:
Surface defect
Wire rod
Finite element simulation
a b s t r a c t
Highsurface quality of lowcarbonsteel wire rodis essential toforge mechanical parts since a
small surface defect caninitiate the crack propagation. The aimof this study is to investigate
the deformationbehavior of the surface defects withanotchshape onthe billet inmulti-pass
hot rolling process using FE code, CAMProll. It is focused on the possibility that intentionally
producednotches onthe billet candiminishor growwhentheir initial sizes andlocations are
varied. The contact treatment for three-dimensional rolling simulation in order to prevent
the penetration of free surface nodes into contact surfaces was implemented in CAMProll.
It is assumed that initial surface notches do not propagate in the multi-pass rolling. From
numerical simulations, it was foundthat oval-roundrolling sequence was effective toreduce
the notch depth although it could not eliminate the initial surface defects. And the initial
location is more inuential factor to determine the nal notch size.
2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
As the demand for the material strength of wire rods or bars is
increasing, surface defects of wire rods have a signicant inu-
ence on the surface quality of the mechanical parts, especially
in secondary forming processes such as forging or drawing
processes. The surface defects can initiate the surface cracks
or may be main source of the surface folding. Even micro-size
surface defects can induce the material defects in forging or
wire drawing processes. So the stringent surface quality of
wire rods is required for fabricating the mechanical parts. The
bursts frequently observed inthe upsetting test were assumed
to be originated from the typically observed surface defects
of the wire rods. However, the occurrence, propagation, and

Corresponding authors.
E-mail addresses: mylife@posco.com (I.H. Son), joodong@posco.com (J.D. Lee), ytim@kaist.ac.kr (Y.T. Im).
disappearance of these surface defects in wire rod rolling are
not yet fully gured out and preventive measures are not well
developed although many studies to investigate the mecha-
nism have been carried out.
The engineers of the Eisenh uttenleute (1973) collaborated
in dening wire rod defects, describing these phenomena
according to their occurrence and the possibility of confusing
themwith other defects. The typical illustrations and descrip-
tions of the defects were useful aid in the early detection
and elimination of the possible causes of the defect and stan-
dardizing defect nomenclature. Total 21 kinds of the surface
defects such as cracks, laps, scratches, surface decarburiza-
tion, etc. were categorized in terms of occurrence, detection,
and possibility of confusion with other defects. Sychkov et al.
0924-0136/$ see front matter 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2007.11.129
92 j ournal of materi als processi ng technology 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 9196
Fig. 1 Schematic diagram for determining the contact
nodes on the free surfaces.
(2006) classied various types of the surface defects of the wire
rods transformed from defects in steelmaking process. They
pointed out that accurate classication of surface defects on
rolled products in terms of their causes and where they were
formed in the rolling process was not easy. For example, it is
sometimes confusing to distinguish laps fromrolled-in cracks
or to distinguish rolled-in scabs from folds.
Barlow et al. (1984) examined the edge surface cracking
of bars and wire rods by rolling plasticines in hand-operated
mills. They concluded that the presence of tensile forces
had a pronounced effect on surface cracking and the cracks
were originated in the low-spread regions to relieve the ten-
sile stress since longitudinal elongation of these edge regions
exceeded the ductility of the material. Moreover, they men-
tioned that roll-pass design including alignment, roll gap
control should be adjusted and scale must be removed from
the billet surface at an early stage of rolling, otherwise it can
cause a pitted surface nish. Kim et al. (1999) investigated the
relationship between the wrinkle defects of wire rods and roll
caliber design. They cut off the samples of the billet in each
stands of wire rod mill and then analyzed the samples. They
pointed out that the both-side rolling sequence design of the
roughing stage made center part of a billet have less spread
width than that of other parts. Im et al. (2004) found that the
wrinkle defect could be originated from the ow localization
phenomenonexplained by DMM(dynamic material modeling)
technique (Venugopal et al., 1995). They suggested the appro-
priate roll shapes and temperature ranges which reduced the
wrinkle defect withanaidof the hot upsetting test andnumer-
ical simulations.
Ervasti and St ahlberg (1999) investigated the evolution of
surface cracks in longitudinal and transversal directions in
plate rolling using FE simulations. Eriksson (2004) carried out
the numerical simulations to see the closing and opening of
the V-shaped cracks in oval-round series. He conrmed from
the experiments that the false round-oval series were bene-
cial compared to the square-oval series in that a surface crack
in the groove bottom opened up during rolling at the same
time its depth was reduced. Shinohara and Yoshida (2005a,b)
carried out the numerical simulations to examine the defor-
Fig. 2 Denition of the surface notch shape and locations
(1: top; 2: middle; 3: bottom).
mation behavior of surface cracks in rolling comprising box
and oval passes to treat the roughing mill stands. Most of the
initial cracks developed into the overlaps after rolling. The
crack depth at free surface, where the cracks do not come
into contact with roll surface, increased, whereas the crack
depth decreased when cracks come into contact with roll
and are subjected to compressive stress. They also modeled
the crack removal by grinding wire rods and found out that
ground surface was recovered during multi-pass wire draw-
ings. Takezawz (2005) investigatedthe relationshipof the crack
depth of rectangular shape according to the initial location
with experiments and analyses and also inuence of caliber
corner radius on depth of defect. Kushida (2005) compared the
strain distribution and maximum depth of observed defects
using FE simulation.
In current study, the deformation behavior of intentionally
generated surface defects with notch shapes was focused in
order toinvestigate the effect of notchsize andinitial locations
using the numerical simulations. For this purpose, FE program
to handle contact treatment was developed to simulate the
multi-pass rolling.
2. Finite element modeling
2.1. Contact algorithm
In rolling simulation with notches, free surfaces between the
notches can meet each other and penetrate without proper
boundary constraint. Inthe current study, the free surface con-
Table 1 Roll setups and the temperature conditions (O:
oval; R: round; H: horizontal; V: vertical)
Pass no. Type Temperature (

C) RA (%)
1 O, H 930 29
2 R, V 920 17
3 O, H 912 19
4 R, V 905 15
j ournal of materi als processi ng technology 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 9196 93
Fig. 3 Deforming notch shapes in the rst pass rolling simulation.
tact phenomenon was treated as a contact problem between
deformable bodies and the contact searching and constraint
algorithms developed by Hahn and Im (1995) were currently
revised for three-dimensional rolling simulation.
For contact treatment between free surfaces, contacting
nodes must rst be identied during simulations. For a free
surface node, the normal distance between this node and all
opposite surface segments as showninFig. 1 was calculated. If
this distance (l) was within specied tolerance, l
tol
=0.001, this
node was determined to be a free surface contact node. This
process was repeated until all free surface nodes had been
processed with contact searching scheme.
Once all contacting nodes on free surfaces have been iden-
tied, proper boundary conditions should be applied in order
to prevent penetration between contacting free surfaces. The
penalty method was introduced to enforce this impenetra-
bility condition. In this method, a constraint contact force
depending on the amount of relative velocity was calculated
as follows:
=

S
C
F
n
v
i
dS
C
=

S
C
v
rel
v
i
dS
C
(1)
where v
i
, v
rel
, and are the nodal velocity, relative velocity
between free surface contact nodes and contact area, S
c
, and
penalty constant in that order. This weak form was added to
the traction boundary term.
2.2. FE model
Linear hexahedral elements for FE simulations were gener-
ated with the sweeping method from the two-dimensional
quadrilateral elements, in all the simulations 3260 brick
elements were used. The round billet of 28mm in diam-
eter was rolled through four passes with roll calibers in
reference (Lee et al., 2000) to produce a round shape of
approximately 19mm in diameter. Three notches were made
at the top, middle, and bottom locations although notches
are observed at various locations of the billet in rolled wire
rods. The locations of the surface notches on a quarter
simulation model are shown in Fig. 2. A notch shape was
dened with two parameters, notch depth (d) and inclina-
tion angle (). The size of a notch was 1mm in depth and
two angle conditions, 30

(Case I) and 60

(Case II), were con-

sidered. The detailed roll set-ups and temperature condition
are described in Table 1. In this study, iso-thermal condi-
tion in roll gap deformation was assumed and Shidas ow
rule (Kwon et al., 2003) for 0.1wt.% low carbon steel was
used.
3. Results and discussion
Fig. 3 shows the deforming shapes of the notches created
on a billet in the rst pass rolling with the oval caliber. For
Case I, the notches at the top and middle locations which
were in contact with the roll, they decreased in depth and
Fig. 4 Strain distribution of the cross-section in the rst oval sequence after rolling (Case I): (a) horizontal; (b) vertical; and
(c) longitudinal (rolling) direction.
94 j ournal of materi als processi ng technology 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 9196
Fig. 5 Contacted notches with the roll in the four-pass rolling: (a) Case I; and (b) Case II.
Fig. 6 Changes of the notch depth in the four-pass rolling: (a) Case I; and (b) Case II.
closed after rolling. However, notch at the bottom location
which did not come into contact with the roll just decreased
in depth. For the notches contacted with the roll, they were
subjected to the compressive stress in the vertical and hor-
izontal direction and also tensile stress in the longitudinal
direction. For oval rolling with the round billet, it usually can
induce severe deformation in the roll contact region since top
location of a billet start to contact rst and elongate in the
rolling direction. This phenomenon can be conrmed from
the strain distribution of the cross-section of the rolled billet
as shown in Fig. 4. The maximum strain which was reduced
in depth and closed occurred at the top notch in the horizon-
tal and vertical directions. The major strain component of the
notch at the bottom was in the longitudinal direction, which
Fig. 7 Deformed shapes of the surface notches in the four-pass rolling (Case I).
j ournal of materi als processi ng technology 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 9196 95
Fig. 8 Deformed shapes of the surface notches in the four-pass rolling (Case II).
resulted in small reduction in depth. For Case II, the defor-
mation patterns were almost close to that of Case I, but top
and middle notches in contact with the roll were still open
after rolling. The notch at the middle location deformed on
the skew since its left side was under larger deformation in
the vertical and horizontal directions compared to the right
side.
Fig. 5 shows the contacting notches with the roll through
the four-pass rolling simulations. It was found that the con-
tact conditions of the notches changed in alternate manner.
The notches at the top and middle locations were in contact
with the oval rolls in the rst and third stands. To the con-
trary, they were not in contact with the round rolls in the
second and nal stands. However, the notch at the bottom
contacted with the round rolls but not with oval rolls. Fig. 6
shows the variations of the notch depth according to the con-
tact conditions through the four-pass rolling. The variations
of the notch depth showed a similar behavior for both cases.
The maximum reduction of the notch depth occurred in the
rst oval pass for all the initial surface notches. This situation
can be inferred that maximum RA value occurred in the rst
pass. For the top notch, its depth was continuously decreased
through the remaining passes after maximumdecrease in the
rst pass. For the bottom notch, there was no reduction in
depth for rolling passes with the round caliber although the
top notch not in contact with the round caliber was reduced
in depth. This means that rolling with the round caliber was
not effective to reduce the notch depth in the location of con-
tact region. The middle notch had a similar pattern for the
bottom notch although it was not in contact with the round
calibers. However, the middle notch showed a relatively large
decrease in depth in the nal rolling with the round caliber.
This large reduction was found in Figs. 7 and 8 that show
the deformed notch shapes of Case I and Case II, respec-
tively.
4. Conclusions
In current study, the deformation behavior of the surface
defect with a notch shape was investigated using CAMProll
equipped with contact treatment for three-dimensional
rolling simulations. The rolling simulations were successfully
carried out to see the evolution of deforming notches in multi-
pass oval-round sequence. It was found that the oval-round
rolling sequence was effective to make the notches decrease
in depth although this rolling sequence could not eliminate
the evolved notches. The initial location of the notch on wire
rods was more inuential factor to determine the nal notch
size. The notchat the top locationshowed the largest decrease
in depth in the rolling simulations and the bottom notch in
contact with the round caliber had no decrease in depth.
Therefore, the rolling sequence should be properly designed
to reduce or eliminate the generated surface defects in inter-
mediate rolling stands.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge Mr. Gi-Taek Woo and Seok-Jun Jung
of the Wire Rod Department and Mr. Sung-Woon Park of the
Wire Rod Research Group in POSCO for this research. Y. T. Im
wishes to acknowledge the Grant of National Research Lab-
oratory Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology
through the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (no.
R0A-2006-000-10240-0).
r e f e r e nce s
Barlow, K.N., Lancaster, P.R., Maddison, R.T., 1984. Examination of
surface defects induced during hot rolling of high-alloy steel
bar and rod. Met. Technol. 11, 1419.
96 j ournal of materi als processi ng technology 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 9196
Eisenh uttenleute, V.D., 1973. Wire Rod Defects. Verlag Stahleisen
M. B. H, D usseldorf.
Eriksson, C., 2004. Surface cracks in wire rod rolling. Steel Res.
Int. 75, 818828.
Ervasti, E., St ahlberg, U., 1999. Behaviour of longitudinal surface
cracks in the hot rolling of steel slabs. J. Mater. Proc. Technol.
94, 141150.
Hahn, Y.W., Im, Y.T., 1995. Finite element analysis of free surface
contact in open-die forging. In: Proc. ICCP-IV, Barcelona,
Spain, pp. 36.
Y.T. Im, H.C. Kwon, H.W. Lee, S.M. Byon, H.D. Park, Development
of process design technology for decreasing surface cracks in
bar rolling, Technical Report, POSCO, 2004.
Kim, J.Y., Cho, Y.G., Kim, Y.H., Lim, K.H., Lee, Y.S., 1999. The
inuence of roll caliber design on the wire rods wrinkle
defect. In: Yi, J.J., Hwang, S.M. (Eds.), Proc. Exploitation of
Future Rolling Technologies. Korea, pp. 180187.
Kushida, H., 2005. Analysis of surface defects on bar and wire
rolling. CAMP-ISIJ 18, 1225.
Kwon, H.C., Lee, Y., Im, Y.T., 2003. Experiment and numerical
prediction of austenite grain size distribution in round-oval
shape rolling. ISIJ Int. 43, 19671975.
Lee, Y., Choi, S., Kim, H., Choo, W.Y., 2000. An experimental study
of the mean effective strain in rod (or bar) rolling process.
Met. Mater 6, 525531.
Shinohara, T., Yoshida, K., 2005a. Deformation analysis of surface
crack in rolling and wire drawing. JSME Int. 48,
335340.
Shinohara, T., Yoshida, K., 2005b. Deformation analysis of surface
aws in stainless steel wire drawing. J. Mater. Proc. Technol.
162/163, 579584.
Sychkov, A.B., Zhigarev, M.A., Perchatkin, A.V., Mazanov, S.N.,
Zemin, V.Z., 2006. The transformation of defects in
continuous-cast seminished product into surface defects on
rolled products. Metallurgist 50, 8390.
Takezawz, K., 2005. Basic research on surface defect deformation
behaviour in steel bar rolling. CAMP-ISIJ 18, 1224.
Venugopal, S., Venugopal, S., Sivaprasad, P.V., Vasudevan, M.,
Mannan, S.K., Jha, S.K., Pandey, P., Prasad, Y.V.R.K., 1995.
Validation of processing maps for 304L stainless steel using
hot forging, rolling and extrusion. J. Mater. Proc. Technol. 59,
343350.