The use of Taguchi method to improve grain size homogeneity in wire rods of medium carbon steels

摘要

This study shows an application of Taguchi DOE (design of experiments) method of orthogonal matrices in order to obtain a robust process, concerning grain size homogeneity, during hot rolling of medium carbon steel wire rods for the fabrication of bars. The main goal here was to find out ways to minimize the occurence of coarse localized pearlite grains in the structure of the material which is slowly cooled in coils after hot rolling. This was done by the identification of the main variables that are related tothe problem and then adjusting their optimum operating levels, maximizing Taguchi signal-to-noise relations, to values indicated by the results of the experiments.