| Abstract Scope |
Each year billions of aluminum beverages cans are manufactured, which means can body stock, made of AA3104, has one of the largest aluminum markets globally. Production of can body stock involves multiple key manufacturing steps, starting with large-scale DC casting, homogenization step, and a series of hot and cold rolling down to the final gauge. Since AA3104 is non heat-treatable alloy, the resulting microstructure from the final rolling steps will ultimately determine properties and performance of the can body stock. Therefore, it becomes important to develop a numerical tool that can quantitatively capture microstructure evolution during production. In this work, an ICME framework is developed to predict crystallographic texture, recrystallization, and distribution of intermetallic particles in AA3104 during hot and cold rolling processes. The framework demonstrated that it could capture evolution of microstructure of interest with sufficient accuracy as well as be used to provide suggestions to improved rolling schedules. |