Hot strip rolling process is one of the most promising industrial processes to fabricate finished or semi-finished bulk products. Numerical analysis on the temperature and thermal stress distributions in a high speed steel work roll during hot rolling has been conducted based on a transient thermo-mechanical model. Influence of initial work roll body temperature on temperature and thermal stress has been discussed in detail by assuming different rolling stages. Compared to the work roll surface, stress is much smaller at depth of 2.1 mm and 5.0 mm, respectively. Results showed similar maximum circumferential thermal stress at both depths of 2.1 mm and 5.0 mm when the roll has initial temperature of 25 °C and 100 °C, but they are about 3 times and 8 times larger than at depth of 2.1 mm and 5.0 mm, respectively, when the initial temperature is 200 °C.

In this study, texture evolution during high pressure torsion (HPT) of aluminum single crystal is predicted by the crystal plasticity finite element method (CPFEM) model integrating the crystal plasticity constitutive theory with Bassani & Wu hardening model. It has been found by the simulation that, during the HPT process, the lattice rotates mainly around the radial direction of the sample. With increasing HPT deformation, the initial cube orientation rotates progressively to the rotated cube orientation, and then to the C component of ideal torsion texture which could be remained over a wide strain range. Further HPT deformation leads to the orientation towards to the ideal texture component.

Equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) has attracted a lot of interest due to its ability for fabrication of bulk ultrafine-grained materials. With the development of computer skills, the computer-aided methods become very important and useful in understanding the deformation mechanism of ECAP. In this study, the influence of mesh size during finite element simulations of ECAP has been examined based on the plane strain condition assumption. Four different meshes have been compared and these results indicate that Mesh 600 and Mesh 2400 fail to capture the deformation features of ECAP accurately. Large corner gaps develop in these two cases and the simulated strains are smaller than the analytical calculations. Similar results have been obtained between Mesh 6369 and Mesh 12000 and the predicted features of plastic deformation and texture evolution are consistent with the experimental results.

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Soil aggregate stability and soil erodibility (k) are crucial indicators of soil quality that exhibit high sensitivity to changes in soil function. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the quantitative relationship between these indicators and soil quality for effective ecosystem monitoring and assessment. In this study, soil samples were collected from eight altitude gradients in a karst mountainous area; we analyzed 11 soil physical, chemical, and biological properties, and assessed soil quality using the minimum data set (MDS) method. The results revealed that soil aggregate stability, bulk density (BD), pH, and fungal community diversity exhibited a unimodal altitudinal pattern, whereas the soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), and C:N ratio showed an increasing trend. Among the factors considered, SOC, BD, soil pH, mechanical composition, and fungal community diversity were found to explain the most variation in soil aggregate stability and soil erodibility (k). Principal component analysis (PCA) identified soil fungal community diversity, C:N ratio, coarse sand, and macro-aggregate (MA) content as highly weighted indicators for MDS. The integrated soil quality index (SQI) values, ranging from 0.30 to 0.62 across the eight altitude gradients, also exhibited a unimodal altitudinal pattern. The analysis indicated a significant linear relationship between the fractal dimension (D) and soil erodibility of the EPIC model (Kepic) with SQI, suggesting that D and Kepic can serve as alternative indicators for soil quality. These findings further enhance our understanding of the response of soil properties to altitude changes, and provide a novel method for assessing and monitoring soil quality in karst mountainous areas.