Ferritic rolling to produce soft deep-drawable thin hot strips

In a conventional production of deep-drawable sheets of steel, a hot rolling in austenite and a cold rolling at room temperature together with a subsequent recrystallization annealing are applied with a cold strip as a final product. As a cost saving replacement for this, a thin-gauge hot strip with a required deep-drawability can be employed. A conventionally (in austenite) hot rolled strip is hardly applicable for this because of its unsatisfactory texture as well as because of the technical difficulties to produce hot strips with sufficiently small thicknesses. As a promising realization of cast saving thin-gauge deep-drawable hot strips of steel, a warm rolling can be applied with reduced finish rolling temperatures. In this practice the finish rolling is shifted down into the temperature region of ferrite. In the present work extensive laboratory tests on IF- and ELC-steel were carried out by using the hot deformation simulator Wumsi. By the measurements of the texture development as well as by the computing of r-values, the process parameters of ferritic rolling and a subsequent direct recrystallization in the coil of these steels could be optimized.