Some trends in roll design for manufacture of long products

Roll design in hot rolling mills is a principal factor that delimits the quality, efficiency and costs in the relevant fabrication system. The ultimate goal of a roll designer is to ensure sustainable manufacture of long product with specified morphometric envelope, microstructure, and mechanical attributes. In this article, diversity of designs used for products and mills that are both being either similar or identical is addressed along with concluding that this implies that many of these designs are not optimized sufficiently. Present data recording, storing, sharing and analysis facilities allow for an unprecedented outreach in solving roll design tasks. Along with the need to intelligently structure large industrial databases, there is a prerequisite for overcoming the communication barriers such as intellectual property and commercial confidentiality. An outline of roll design strategies is presented with a view to extract logics that permeates and dominates in this variety.