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INSIDE
COIL
PROCESSING
A TREND Publication
December 2013
SPECIAL REPORT
TRAINING &
EDUCATION
Metalworking’s campaign
to build a future workforce
coilprocessing
A larger than normal slitter handles advanced highstrength steel. Its hydraulic tool lockup feature
provides consistency among operators and jobs.
High-speed
SLITTING
Coil processing line handles range of materials
including advanced high-strength steel
BY THOMAS L. KLEMENS, P.E.
ith every opportunity comes a challenge. When
Roswell, Ga.-based Kloeckner Metals Corp.
decided in 2011 to build a new coil processing
facility in Calvert, Ala., one of the challenges it faced was
finding an equipment line that would handle a variety of
product including advanced high-strength steel.
W
“We looked at a number of different
sources for the slitter for Calvert,” says Russ
Delaney, president of Kloeckner Metals’
Flat Rolled Group. “After looking at several options, both domestically and off
shore, we decided that Braner offered us
the best fit and value based on what we
were looking to do and for the advanced
high-strength steel applications we were
Modern Metals ® December 2013
particularly designing this slitter to handle.”
The company built its 100,000-square
foot-facility beginning in mid-2012 on-site
with a new ThyssenKrupp mill, which produces carbon steel, and an Outokumpu mill
producing stainless steel. Kloeckner Metals
installed and commissioned its new slitter in
July and August and the facility was fully operational by the official opening on Sept. 1.
Regional service
The company now has 18 flat roll processing plants in key markets, including a
facility in Monterrey, Mexico. “Freight is a
large portion of costs, both inbound and
outbound,” Delaney says. “And service levels required by our customers require us to
be within a few hundred miles of them.”
Being right on-site in Calvert means inbound logistics expenses are about as low
as they can be. “And we feel the Calvert
location, just 30 miles north of Mobile,
Ala., is well-positioned to cover the southern section of the U.S., where a lot of the
growth is going on now and forecast to be
in the future,” Delaney says.
The Calvert plant processes a variety of
coils such as cold rolled and hot rolled pickled and oiled steel; coated products, which
include galvanized, galvanneal, aluminized
and prepainted materials; and stainless
steel. “We buy coils from the mill, as we do
at all our other locations,” Delaney says.
“We process them either into slit coils or
into cut-to-length sheets or blanks, and in
some cases we provide first- and secondstage fabrication to those products to
provide our customers with just-in-time delivery in the most efficient form possible.”
The slitting line can run material from
0.010 inches to 0.250 inches thick and up
to 74 inches wide. “We can handle 40-ton
incoming coils, which matches the mill’s
capability as far as coil sizes go,” Delaney
says. “And we can produce 84-inch OD
slit coil, which is larger than most slitters
that are currently installed can provide.”
Customers appreciate the larger coils because they reduce the scrap generated by
each start and stop.
Heavy duty equipment
In addition to its large capacity, the slitter is
designed to run advanced high-strength
steels up to 260 ksi tensile strength. Predominantly used in the automotive industry
at this time, these materials are becoming
more popular in other industries trying to
achieve more strength with less weight.
“It’s really a high-strength line,” says
Chuck Damore, president of Braner USA,
Schiller Park, Ill. “We see trends in the industry going that way. Many of the newer
slitters we’re producing today can run this
ultra high-strength material.” To be able to
do that, he says, means building big machines with big arbors, lots of rigidity and
plenty of horsepower.
But because the Braner slitting line is
presently Kloeckner Metals’ only equipment at the Calvert facility, it’s also
important for the line to be able to handle a wide range of products for various
applications. For example, Damore says,
this line has the ability to run thin gauge
material into a pre-slit loop with a com-
Kloeckner Metals’ Braner slitting
line accepts coils as large as 84
inches in diameter and can
operate at 1,000 feet per minute.
bination drag generator/uncoiler loop
drive. “The advantage of that is it provides much better tension control than a
traditional pneumatic brake-type uncoiler,” he says. “That means they’re
slitting the material tension-free, and that
provides improved width tolerances and
strip edge quality.”
The slitter itself also is much bigger than
on a traditional line. Additionally it has a
hydraulic tool lockup feature to provide
clamping consistency from operator to operator and from one job to another.
“We’ve also developed an Andiamo
threading system that allows you to run a
short tab into the slitter, then start the slitting process maybe 6 inches back,”
Damore says. “Then you’re threading a
single piece of material across the line,
rather than 15 cuts, for example. You
thread that single piece up to the exit end
of the line, then cut it off.” It’s not hard to
imagine how simplifying the threading
process improves machine productivity,
which was one of Kloeckner’s key criteria.
Equipping the line with a two-position
turret recoiler was a further boost to pro-
ductivity. “With that, you can do all of
your banding and coil preparation offline
while you’re winding a master coil in the
line,” Damore says. “So the line is never
down to put outside diameter bands
around the finished coils. Having a turret
recoiler will improve slitter uptime by as
much as 50 percent.”
Full speed ahead
With such productivity-enhancing features
at the beginning and end of the line, slitter
throughput capacity becomes a critical
consideration. This particular installation
can run at 1,000 feet per minute, but because appearance is an important factor
on much of the material being processed,
Kloeckner Metals installed a Cognex surface inspection system on the line. “It is
basically a photographic system that can
see defects down to 1⁄10,000 of an inch on both
the top and bottom surface,” Delaney says.
Although Cognex has installed this type of
equipment in numerous mills, this is the
first such installation in the service center
industry. “It will really allow us to be able
to run this equipment at high speed and
still be able to detect defects that are actually smaller than what a human eye would
see,” he says.
Because the company anticipates running a wide range of products on this line,
it has been outfitted with a range of tenDecember 2013 Modern Metals®
coilprocessing
sioners as well. “Multiple tensioning devices allow them to run both a wide
thickness range and a range of products,”
Damore says. “There is a tension device
for oiled material, critical surface, and a
different tension device for dry material,
critical surface. Those are roll tensioning
devices. And there’s a pad tensioner for
non-critical surface material.”
“We also have the capability to re-oil coils
on this slitter,” Delaney says. “Some end
users require special oils on their material,
so that’s another advantage of this line that
you don’t often find on slitters.”
As if that weren’t enough, the line includes Braner’s patented inline cluster
leveler that corrects problems in the incoming coil. “If the material has a wavy
edge or center buckle, the inline leveling
capabilities on this line can shape correct
it while they’re running at speeds up to
1,000 feet a minute,” Damore says. “It’s a
huge advantage because it allows them to
enhance the value of the strip.”
Modern Metals ® December 2013
After a traversing downender
places the coils on a conveyor,
they move through a strapping
station to a turret stacker.
With all the features on the slitting line
designed to optimize throughput, it becomes important to process the finished
product rapidly as well. Braner supplied a
packaging line designed to keep up with
the high production rates. “Once coils
come off the slitter, they go onto a turnstile
to stage the coils downstream,” Damore
says. “Then we have an automated packaging line that takes coils automatically
through a traversing downender. As the
downender lifts each coil off the turnstile,
it rotates the coil 90 degrees and sets it on
a conveyor. From there it goes downstream through a strapping station where
bands are applied around the coil.” A turret stacker places the banded coils on skids
where they are weighed and covered with
stretch-wrap for shipping.
Although Kloeckner Metals began with
one shift at the Calvert plant, it anticipates
growth opportunities down the road.
“We’re on property where we can expand
up to 400,000 square feet,” says Delaney,
“and we do have rail there. So we are intending to grow this business, initially with
the Braner slitter that we put in, and then
as our customers have other demands for
other processes.”
Meanwhile, the operation is off to a
good start. “Braner delivered the equipment on time, it was installed on time and
was commissioned with minimal startup
issues. We are very happy with its performance.” ■
Braner USA Inc., Schiller Park, Ill.,
847/671-6210, fax: 847/671-0537,
www.braner.com.
Kloeckner Metals Corp.,
Roswell, Ga., 678/259-8800,
www.kloecknermetals.com.
Reprinted from Modern Metals ® December 2013 • Copyright Trend Publishing Inc.