EdgerRolls
Advanced manufacturing and improved performances of hot rolling mill edger rolls (EdgerRolls)
Objectives
The EdgerRolls project aims at securing the supply of high-quality tapered edger rolls for European hot strip mills by adapting existing and emerging manufacturing methods to the production and rebuilding of edger rolls.
The second ambition of the EdgerRolls project is to improve the performances of edger rolls using an improved cooling strategy, lubrication and optimised caliper geometries and process parameters.
The improvement of the performances will be verified by monitoring tools that will be developed in the project. The first is an adaptation of an inspection tool to analyze and monitor edger rolls degradation and the second is an on-line profile measurement.
Description
In hot strip processing, the final strip width is defined at the roughing mill stage by the edgers rolls. Edger rolls are placed at the entry side of a roughing stand. Many layouts exist throughout Europe and worldwide. One identifies two major types of edger rolls:
Caliber (or caliper) rolls are used in conventional hot strip mills (HSM), usually in the first roughing stand to achieve heavy width reductions. Those rolls usually weigh between 10 and 18 tons and have cylindrical vertical barrel parts and large flanges at both the upper and lower sides of the barrel.
Tapered rolls have a conical barrel shape, with a slightly bigger diameter at the top side than at the bottom side, and a relatively small flange at the bottom side of the barrel. They are used mainly to correct minimal width deviations or for strip guiding. They are generally of smaller size (1 to 6 tons), traditionally used in the 2nd to 5th roughing stands of conventional hot strip mills. Supply of tapered edger rolls – and small-sized (<8 tonnes) edger rolls in general – is a real issue for European hot strip mills as only one reliable supplier remains in Europe to produce graphitic cast steel edger rolls. A few European suppliers for nodular cast iron edgers remain, but those performances are roughly half of graphitic cast steel edgers.
Partners
Funding Bodies
