Strip mill operation

Steel announced Tuesday that it will resume production of its hot strip mill at the Granite City Works plant in February, a move that will put more than people back to work, according to the county board chairman. The company, in a statement on its website, said it will adjust its hot strip mill operating configuration to support a previously announced asset revitalization process, with slabs beginning to be processed at the now-idled Granite City hot strip mill in mid-February of next year. Steel intends to source slabs from its own domestic facilities, the company said in the release. Madison County Board Chairman Kurt Prenzler said the announcement means more than steelworkers will resume working in a few months.

Steel and aluminum go through several processing steps before they are ready to be formed into finished products. Hot rolling is widely considered the most critical step to make uniform sheet metal of specific thickness, depending on the end use. Hot rolling of steel occurs at very high temperatures, above the recrystallization temperature of the material, producing malleable sheets that can be formed in a variety of shapes. The process produces sheets that can be extremely long, which are then rolled into coils. While these coils are tested to ensure they meet certain specifications, the process can be challenging, as explained in the thefabricator.

Michael Degner This book contains contributions and references to the quality improvement, to the increase of plant availability and the yield, to the conservation of resources during production, as well as to automation, control and metallurgical plant concepts in the rolling of hot strip. There are published summaries of technical papers presented at international conferences and published results of papers and patents. David T. Blazevic In this fourth volume of Hot Strip Mill Operations, the primary objectives are to separate localized shape distortions, such as buildup, from general shape problems, and to explain how buildup goes through the hot strip and cold strip mills.

In simple terms, a strip processing line consists of a device to hold a supply coil of strip and a device to perform an operation to convert the flat coiled strip into a product. In tube mill operations, a supply coil is positioned in the coil holding device, the end of the coil is fed into the tube mill, and the mill operates until the supply coil is depleted. The total operation then stops until a new supply coil is positioned and the leading end is again fed into the mill. Line operation is intermittent, possibly running 60 percent of the time. Needless to say, this is not an ideal situation, as a tube mill line represents a significant capital investment that produces a high-value product.