EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

Yield and economy during hot rolling of flat products depend on developing high capacity components fulfilling further increasing customers demands for cost and resource effective production of steel strip and plate material. The paper gives an overview of the latest developments for high capacity components and tools of SMS group for conventional hot strip mills, CSP® plants and heavy plate mills. The SMS components cover the fields’ mill mechanics, electric and automation as well as mill reliability and customer strip and plate quality figures in case of modernization tasks as well as erection of new mills. Regarding hot flat strip mills the topics according to material flow are treated as follows: • New designed slab and strip descaling systems equipped with frequency controlled valves and maintenance friendly top and bottom header design, • Rigid hydraulically driven heavy side guides for centering actions enabling camber and wedge free rolling of transfer bar and final strip, • Heat cover hoods with individual change able heat panel elements providing less maintenance effort and extended reliability, • Torque spindles for the finishing train drives transmitting rolling torques even using smaller work roll diameters, • Compact Roll Cooling System based on forced convection principle, • Assistant system for proper leveling the finishing train stand screw actuators to prevent strip tail end chewing during feeding out causing roll and mill stand damages, • Reinforced and super reinforced laminar cooling headers providing higher cooling rates for processing steel grades with advanced mechanical technological properties and • Asymmetrical acting strip edge masking system controlled by the strip tracking behavior on the run out table protecting over cooling of the strip edges and flatness defects. For heavy plate mills the multi flex quench system was developed fulfilling necessary cooling rates for processing plates with advanced mechanical properties for more sophisticated applications. Finally the topics Industry 4.0 applications and PQA-techniques for thoroughgoing quality assessment in hot flat rolling mills are discussed. Key words: Conventional hot strip mill, CSP® mill, Heavy plate mill, Industry 4.0, PQA, mill modernization, mill erection, high capacity mill components