Sheet Processing and Finishing Lines 

Conference Details: 20–23 March 2022, Indianapolis, Ind., USA
No. of Attendees: 88
This three-day seminar consisted of 23 different presentations and was designed to teach the attendee about the different processes that take place at the cold mill and beyond, including pickling, coating, slitting and preparation for shipping. The first presentations gave an overview of what would be discussed over the following days and the fundamental overall layouts of various process lines.
Steel Dynamics Inc.’s Joe Ostrowski presented on the new galvanizing and paint lines that are being installed concurrently at both the company’s Heartland and Sinton facilities. Mark Zipf of SMS group Inc. gave a presentation on incoming material to give the attendees a good understanding of how the quality of the incoming material will affect the next process and stressed that each process’s outgoing material is the next process’s incoming material. For continuous processes, welding is very important, so both resistant and laser welding technologies were presented as well as techniques of how to verify the weld quality. The pickling and strip cleaning processes were presented to give the attendee an understanding of how to get the strip clean. The processes of annealing, skinpass and temper rolling were also presented.
The seminar included a tour of Steel Dynamics Inc. – Flat Roll Group Heartland Division’s pickling line, reversing cold mill and galvanizing line.
The technologies to identify surface defects via camera systems were presented. Flatness verification and control was presented in detail, which clearly described the techniques for measuring the flatness of the strip using flatness rolls. The various coating lines were described in detail, including paint, tinplating and paint lines. Slitting lines and the mechanics of the slitting knives were also presented. The final presentation was on preparing the product for shipping.
This conference will be available again in the fall of 2023.