Production of flatness gauge IP-4 and application of flatness gauge to rolling-mill production.
Establishment of the flatness automatic control system on the basis of the flatness gauge IP-4.
Organisation of complex services in design, production and selling of the flatness gauge systems
for the cold and hot rolling of ferrous and nonferrous metals.
Certification and licensing for sale in Russia.
Summary
Inkomet has been developing and testing this type of equipment under Bortnik Fund financing and in
cooperation with several steel and non-ferrous metallurgical firms (including industry leaders such
as NLMK, Severstal). One prototype of the equipment has been installed in the Severstal factory since
2001; another is used in a titanium casting line in the Urals. The company currently employs 8 people.
Flatness and dimensional criteria are included in the current quality standards for many sheet and
plate products, e.g. steel, aluminium plates, door leaves etc. The consumers of steel plate and
strip products are increasingly requiring tighter dimensional tolerances and better profiling and
shaping. A flatness disturbance can be produced at a hot strip mill by a mismatch between the work
roll profile and the incoming strip thickness profile. This will produce a non-uniform reduction
across the width of the strip, leading to a non-uniform elongation of the strip in the direction of
the rolling. Flatness measurement methods are nowadays developing rapidly and several different
types of sensors are commercially available.
3m different technologies are in competition in the field of plate shape measurement:
the most classical is based on physical sensors embedded in the rolling mill
to measure surface irregularities;
more recent models are based on laser altimeters which offer a contact-free measurement
of the plate thickness and shape;
the proposed technology is optical/analogical whereby the shape is measured
by analysing the signal captured by a video camera.
Preliminary testing of the equipment in factory conditions at several different production sites
have revealed product superiority over competitive technologies in terms of:
equal/superior measurement precision;
better measurement precision stability in factory conditions (smoke, dust);
better resistance to adverse environmental conditions (high temperatures, variations);
lesser purchase price, lesser operation cost.
Three different uses are made of such a flatness monitoring within the steel production chain:
the engineers regulating the casting of steel (measurement is fed back to the production parameters);
the finished products storage where the steel is classified by quality;
the methods department which collects and analyses production data in the frame of an on-going effort aimed
at the improvement of the steel quality and the increase in productivity.
The price tag of the equipment using the proposed technology much lower than the price set by
current competitors (less than $200 instead of typically $500); the incidence of a cheaper
measurement could be a much greater number of monitoring points, collecting a much larger volume of
information about the same steel casting, resulting in large gains in quality of the steel (or metal)
output.
Potential customers for the technology are the ferrous and non-ferrous industries in both the
former Soviet Union and the rest of the world, plus the world's SSC (steel service centers, i.e.,
metals wholesalers).
Cost
Total cost of the project is £400,000. The DTI is funding a contribution of
£95,000.
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