Sven-Erik Lundberg:
Improving the utilization in bar rolling
Bar rolling, mill utilization, roll pass design, single family rolling, safety, education
With increasing cost for energy, manpower and utilities, it becomes essential to keep a high utilization of bar and wire rod mills. Especially since the capital cost for a mill is strongly dependent on the output, and thus for a given mill, the utili-zation influences the capital cost.
It is partly possible to affect the utilization by internal measures, but market conditions strongly influence the possibilities to utilize the mills, which must be run differently depending on the actual market demands. Internally the utilization can be improved by a well planned and systematically performed maintenance schedule to reduce unscheduled downtimes for repair. If a mill is not ready from the design stage for operating at a high degree of utilization, it is always difficult to reach the targeted level. Also the roll pass design must be made to reach a high utilization by minimizing the downtime for dimensional changes. This concerns stand changing as well as groove and guide changing. By an optimized design of the leader ovals and related guide rollers, in combination with a diamond intermediate roll pass design, a single family rolling system can be used also in bar mills, and considerable improvements of the utilization can be obtained.
In many mills the utilization has remained at an unacceptably low level, in spite of a quick changing equipment, the ready to roll concept and other modern rolling philosophies, mainly because they are not consequently implemented and understood by the rolling crew. This illustrates the most important factor to obtain a high utilization of a mill, namely the human influence on the process. In all plants, the people involved in the production have a decisive influence on the utilization and thus the conversion cost and at the end of the day the profit of the company. Therefore, proper education and training for each task and safe and secure working conditions are of utmost importance for the result in any rolling mill.
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