Manufacturology

Playing with refurbished cold rolling mill

Today was a big day at the new metal form­ing lab­o­ra­tory at Dalarna Uni­ver­sity (pre­vi­ously men­tioned in this post): After sev­eral years of talk­ing and plan­ning, our new cold rolling mill finally works. And I’ve spent the day play­ing with it to learn how it works.

I and a few om my col­leagues at the uni­ver­sity had a walk-though together with a Siemens con­sul­tant of the func­tion­al­ity pro­vided by the new con­trol sys­tems and oper­a­tor inter­face. The actual rolling mill is old, and has been rust­ing in a con­tainer for fif­teen years before it was finally been brought back to life. It has now been oiled up, repainted, and equipped with brand new Siemens S7 PLC logic and accom­pa­ny­ing visu­al­i­sa­tion soft­ware. The whole mill is run from the con­trol com­puter, which also col­lects and visu­alises logged out­put sig­nals that can be used to eval­u­ate how the mill performs.

Some work remains to be done — we already came up with a fairly exten­sive wish list. But fact remains: the mill works and we can start to design exper­i­ments and try out our ideas for how to use it in our research and edu­ca­tion. Some things can be improved, and new func­tion­al­ity wished for. How­ever, the next step now is to learn fully how to oper­ate the mill and start using it.

I’m cur­rently not famil­iar with the detailed specs, but you may get an idea about the size of the equip­ment from the above pho­tos. Max­i­mum roll force is, I’ve been told, 100 tonnes (1 MN), and max­i­mum strip width some­where around 100 mm.