Finishing Processes

Steel is marketed in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, such as rods, pipes, railroad rails, tees, channels, and I-beams. These shapes are produced at steel mills by rolling and otherwise forming heated ingots to the required shape. The working of steel also improves the quality of the steel by refining its crystalline structure and making the metal tougher.

The basic process of working steel is known as hot rolling. In hot rolling the cast ingot is first heated to bright-red heat in a furnace called a soaking pit and is then passed between a series of pairs of metal rollers that squeeze it to the desired size and shape. The distance between the rollers diminishes for each successive pair as the steel is elongated and reduced in thickness.

The first pair of rollers through which the ingot passes is commonly called the blooming mill, and the square billets of steel that the ingot produces are known as blooms. From the blooming mill, the steel is passed on to roughing mills and finally to finishing mills that reduce it to the correct cross section. The rollers of mills used to produce railroad rails and such structural shapes as I-beams, H-beams, and angles are grooved to give the required shape.

Modern manufacturing requires a large amount of thin sheet steel. Continuous mills roll steel strips and sheets in widths of up to 2.4 m. Such mills process thin sheet steel rapidly, before it cools and becomes unworkable. A slab of hot steel over 11 cm thick is fed through a series of rollers which reduce it progressively in thickness to 0.127 cm and increase its length from 4 m to 370 m. Continuous mills are equipped with a number of accessory devices including edging rollers, descaling devices, and devices for coiling the sheet automatically when it reaches the end of the mill. The edging rollers are sets of vertical rolls set opposite each other at either side of the sheet to ensure that the width of the sheet is maintained. Descaling apparatus removes the scale that forms on the surface of the sheet by knocking it off mechanically, loosening it by means of an air blast, or bending the sheet sharply at some point in its travel. The completed coils of sheet are dropped on a conveyor and carried away to be annealed and cut into individual sheets. A more efficient way to produce thin sheet steel is to feed thinner slabs through the rollers. Using conventional casting methods, ingots must still be passed through a blooming mill in order to produce slabs thin enough to enter a continuous mill.

By devising a continuous casting system that produces an endless steel slab less than 5 cm thick, German engineers have eliminated any need for blooming and roughing mills. In 1989, a steel mill in Indiana became the first outside Europe to adopt this new system.

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