Everything You Need To Know About Flatteners and Levelers For Coil Processing
Everything You Need To Know About Flatteners and Levelers For Coil Processing
Everything You Need To Know About Flatteners and Levelers For Coil Processing
Edge wave, buckles, and camber are easy to understand. Twist is a little more difficult to visualize as
an edge-to-edge length differential issue. If we unwind a twisted strip, we'll see that the edges and
center have different lengths, depending on the geometry of the twist, or helix. Twist is not simply
coil set up on one side and down on the other side. A twisted strip has a side-to-center-to-side length
differential that, unlike edge wave, continues all the way across the strip.
3. Surface-to-surface thickness differential, or crown (see Figure 7). This is a common problem for
slitters, and it will be discussed in Part IV of this article. Flatteners or levelers can't reduce crown
significantly because their work rolls are offset. It takes a rolling mill with opposed rolls to do that.
Crossbow is another type of surface-to-surface length differential defect and is related to coil set.
This article discusses the causes of crown, but not how to eliminate it.
Wavy edges are an edge-to-edge length differential defect and are created if the edges are longer
than the center.
At the Hot Mill
At the hot mill the crown or thickness profile can be changed without changing the shape or flatness,
and vice versa.
Hot mills try to get the relationship between crown or profile and shape, but achieving both perfect
shape and perfect crown control is almost impossible. With new automatic gauge control (AGC)
technology, the mills are doing much better, but perfection remains an elusive goal.
Crown is a surface-to-surface thickness differential defect that is a common problem for slitters.
Flatteners or levelers can't reduce crown significantly because their work rolls are offset.
I once inspected a brand-new steel mill tension leveler in a hot-dip galvanizing line. The metal
coming out of the zinc pot and going into the leveler looked terrible. It was like a bright, shiny mirror
coming out of the tension leveler. Then it went into a 40-year-old, misaligned accumulator before
being rewound or sheared to length for customers. The accumulator destroyed the shape quality.
The shipped coils and sheets were not flat. The line operators were frustrated because they knew
about the problem but could do nothing to resolve it. My heart went out to them.
I watched an aluminum mill tension leveling coil on a new line. It was dead flat coming out of the
leveler and then they recoiled it, under a lot of tension. The coil was crowned, meaning that the
center of the strip was thicker, so the center of the coil on the rewind arbor had a larger OD. Big
surprise! The operators were rewinding the coil over a barrel. That was pulling center buckle back
into it!
Flatness inspection had been done after leveling and before rewinding. QC insisted the material was
dead flat. The customer said it was buckled when he unwound it. Engineering wanted to know about
Figure 8
If the cold mill rolls or hot mill coils happen to have too much crown, the cold mill will roll out
the center and create center buckle.
the material's "memory" or trapped stresses. Everyone was wrong.
I was asked to provide operator training on an old roller leveler that had been very badly overloaded.
The service center owner told me that the work rolls had just been reground and the machine
recalibrated. His men still could not get flat material out of it.
We found that the backup roller pins were badly distorted and bent. The side frames were sprung.
No amount of training was going to help them. Worse yet, the line management personnel didn't
understand that they were the culprits.
Some years ago I watched a badly maintained service center slitter producing "snakes." The recoiler
arbor had been bent and was wobbling several inches as it rotated, pulling an oscillating camber into
each slit mult coming from the tensioning device.
Any rolls in the system, such as pinch rolls, slitter arbors, flattener rolls, leveler rolls, and, of course,
feeder rolls, that deflect or that are misaligned can produce edge wave or even camber. These rolls
Figure 9
If cold mill rolls or hot mill have too little crown, the cold mill will roll out the edges and create
edge wave.
can put uneven pressure on part of the material and destroy the coil shape in the process.
It's surprising how many operations do not perform preventive maintenance or calibration and
realignment. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Right!
It's surprising how many times I've found that flattener and leveler rolls haven't been reground or
recalibrated in years, if ever.It's surprising how many line operators don't have access to information
about machine capacities or to either nominal or actual material yield strengths of the metals they
are processing.
It's surprising how many line operators have had no training on the meanings of these critical
numbers.
It doesn't make sense to talk about equipment upgrades if the people running the equipment don't
understand the equipment they use now. Before we start talking about new equipment, let's see
what we can do to get the best out of what we already have. I'll discuss this in Parts II and III of this
article series.
Remember, we need to make good stuff out of the bad stuff. Not the other way around.
Eric Theis
Consultant
603 Maple Lane
Sewickley, PA 15143
Published In...
The FABRICATOR
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