Endless strip production
The endless strip production (German about endless belt production ) is a casting process to produce flat strip of steel , wherein the casting process and the rolling process are coupled.
production
During production, a slab that is approx. 70-100 mm thick is cast in a casting machine . Directly after the casting machine there are three stands (HRM = High Reduction Mill) in which a high reduction in strip thickness to approx. 12-25 mm is achieved. The material then passes through an inductive heater and a five-stand finishing train, in which the thickness can be reduced to 0.8 mm. The strip is then cooled in the cooling section to adjust the material properties and after this there is a reel on which the strip is wound into coils , thus completing the production process in the ESP.
Production facility
By installing several shears (after the HRM, before the finishing train and before the coiler ), the rolling mill can be operated in single-piece mode (batch operation) whereby the pre-strips are cut after the HRM and individually rolled out in the finishing train or the ESP system is operated in continuous mode, in which the strips are cut in front of the reel and the rolling operation is continuous. The great advantage of this system is the low energy requirement for the production of the flat steel . While around 4 GJ of energy are required to produce one ton of hot strip in conventional hot rolling mills , this value drops to up to 1 GJ per ton of hot strip in the ESP plant.
The first system has been in operation in Cremona, Italy, since 2008 by Arvedi , which also played a key role in developing the technology. The predecessor plant was a casting and rolling plant at Arvedi, which was supplied by Mannesmann in 1990 and was successively further developed by Giovanni Arvedi and his employees. The supplier for the systems technology is the company Primetals Technologies (formerly Siemens VAI).
In 2015, 3 further ESP systems were commissioned at Rizhao Steel in China.
World record
In October 2018, ultra-thin hot strip with a thickness of 0.6 millimeters was produced for the first time on an Arvedi ESP (Endless Strip Production), which is installed at the Chinese steel producer Rizhao Steel Group Co., Ltd (Rizhao). This value has never been reached before in hot strip worldwide. With this small thickness, more than 80 percent of the commercially available cold-rolled thicknesses can be covered.
Web links
- Arvedi ESP website from Primetals Technologies
- Arvedi ESP - the new era of steel production, Youtube Video