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Home \ Bending \ Articles \ Plate rolls keep rolling heavier plate
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These days, plate rolls are forming plate 6 and 7 inches thick--and even thicker. Vessel designs that would have been forged just a decade ago are now being sent to fabrication houses. The variable-geometry plate roll system, which really operates more like a press brake than a traditional plate roll, is making such extreme rolling possible.
Plate rolls have gotten seriously big. Machine pits are deeper, the frames massive, the rolls ever larger. Certain machines have specifications stating they can roll plate of certain yield strengths to 4, 6, and 7, even 11 inchescold. "I was standing next to just one roll that was sitting on a shop floor," said Bob Stasalovich, director of sales and marketing for plate roll-maker The Sertom Group (TSG) North America, Roscoe, Ill. "I'm about 6 feet, and this roll was about up to my chin. That gives you an idea of just how big these machines are." The niches served by shops that can cold-roll plate 4 in. or thicker have boomed (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). Superheavy rolling systems are fabricating vessels that in years past would have been sent to forging houses.
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According to sources, several factors are spurring demand. First is increased demand from the sectors providing infrastructure and power generation. Second, a lot of old iron remains in heavy fab shops; many are upgrading, and the type of machine they're purchasing has made such heavy rolling practical and cost-effective: the variable-geometry plate roll.
Figure 1 Todays machines are rated to cold-roll seriously thick plate. Here, a machine is being tested to roll 8-in.-thick plate cold. Some machines today have been built to cold-roll up to 11-in.-thick plate. Photo courtesy of Faccin USA
Fixed-geometry Systems
Common double-pinch, fixed-geometry plate rolls can have either three or four rolls, where the bottom rolls rise to meet a fixed top roll. This arrangement dominates much of the industry for a reason: It's simple and efficient. But as plates get thicker, challenges arise, and most involve what all plate rolls, no matter the type, leave behind after an initial rolling operation: the unbent flat. All plate rolls need to pinch the plate edge, which means a small amount of material from that edge remains flat. In a fixed-geometry, three-roll system, prebending minimizes these unbent flat sections. The offset rolls rise to meet the top roll to bend the plate's leading edge upward. An operator can then run the plate flat through the open rolls and position the trailing edge for the second prebend. If floor space is an issue, an operator may use a crane to remove the plate after the initial prebend and rotate it 180 degrees to perform the second prebend. Regardless, rolling commences only after the leading and trailing edges are bent (see Figure 3). Four-roll systems have three rolls on the bottom: a pinch roll in the center and an offset roll on either side. This means the machine can prebend, roll, and then perform the second prebend (in this case it could be called a postbend) on the trailing edge. This gives the four-roll system a slight productivity boost, which, as sources pointed out, is why four-roll systems have become so popular in production-rolling environments such as wind tower plants (see Figure 4).
http://www.thefabricator.com/article/bending/plate-rolls-keep-rolling-heavier-plate
12/24/2011
Plate rolls keep rolling heavier plate - Bending Tech Cell - TheFabricator.com
If a press brake normally bends 0.5-in.-thick plate but on occasion press brakes more than conventional rolling needs to bend 0.75-in., "the operator would pull out a 6- or 8-in.systems. Like a brake punch, the top roll wide V die they used to properly bend the half-inch plate and descends to roll the plate to the desired replace it with a larger, 12- to 14-in.-wide V dieand all of a diameter. Image courtesy of TSG North sudden it takes less tonnage per foot to bend," said Steve Bonnay, America. product manager at plate roll manufacturer Faccin, with home offices in Italy and a U.S. office in Tampa, Fla. The same logic, he said, applies to the variable-geometry rolling machine. The farther the two bottom rolls are away from each other, the less force per foot it takes to roll thick plate. To prebend on a variable-geometry system, the operator can feed the plate in, parallel to the floor, and move a lower roll virtually under the top roll to the precise position needed to produce a minimal flat section (see Figure 7).
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Figure 7 To conduct prebending on a variable-geometry machine, the operator can instruct a bottom roll to move almost completely under the top roll. This allows the rolls to prebend in a way that leaves a minimal unbent flat section at the plate edge. Image courtesy of Davi Inc.
Variable-geometry systems don't have this problem because the two bottom rolls can be positioned under the top roll at just the right spot to leave a minimal unbent flat for the material at hand. Regardless of plate thickness, the flat usually is 1.5 to 2 times material thickness. As Davi explained, "The side rolls of the variable-axis plate rolls can be opened and closed by the operator to create the perfect opening related to the specific plate to be rolled in the machine at that time." It's not that a fixed-geometry machine couldn't be designed to handle extreme thicknesses, but most operations don't see 6-in.-thick plate every day. It comes back to unbent flats. Fixed-geometry systems leave unbent flats up to 2 times the maximum material thickness rated for the machine, regardless of the actual thickness of the plate between the rolls. Variable-geometry systems leave unbent flats up to 2 times the thickness of the plate that's in the machine. The variable-geometry systems also have a benefit if rerolling is required, again because of the system's press brake-like operation. Like a brake punch, the top roll descends to the welded seam in the middle of the unbent flat section and rolls the metal out to the desired radius. "It's really a press roll," said TSG's Stasalovich. "The top roll is able to come down and then roll back and forth slightly over this area, and you don't lose significant thickness capacity like you do on other styles of roll machines." If a job requires a cylinder with no unbent flat portion at the seam, rerolling will be required regardless. Again, no machine can roll a radius right to the plate edge. But often variable-geometry machines allow operators to tweak parameters to correct some differences in roundness, Davi explained, adding that, in some cases, such tweaking can eliminate the need for rerolling.
Rolling Physics
No matter how advanced plate rolls become, the physics of forming doesn't change. Like in the press brake arena, it sometimes makes sense to choose a machine rated for much thicker material than a shop would normally process. Prebending requires more concentrated force, so a machine rated for 6-in.-thick material may be able to prebend material only up to 4 in. thick. It also takes more force to roll to tighter diameters, so as diameters decrease, so should the plate thickness. "Of course, most fabricators rolling superheavy material aren't doing tight-diameter work," Bonnay said. Material yield strengths also affect rolling capacity, and to the frustration of fabricators everywhere, what they order isn't necessarily what they get. Mills promise that the plates they sell will meet or exceed a minimum yield strength. Structural plate rated to be at least 36,000 PSI may in fact be 40,000 to 60,000 PSI, or even more. As sources explained, fabricators should keep this in mind when considering machine capacity.
http://www.thefabricator.com/article/bending/plate-rolls-keep-rolling-heavier-plate
12/24/2011
Plate rolls keep rolling heavier plate - Bending Tech Cell - TheFabricator.com
Taking Time to Save Time
A 20-something plate rolling machine operator, about 6 ft. tall, doesn't look it. The system, capable of cold-rolling superheavy plate, dwarfs him. He operates the machine cautiously, taking eight passes, easing the extraordinarily hefty material to produce the desired diameter. Certain codes specify that the difference between the vessel's maximum and minimum measured diameter cannot exceed 1 percent of the specified diameter. This operator got that variation down to less than one-quarter of 1 percent. Bonnay visited this European shop with managers from a U.S.-based heavy fabricator. With so many passes, it took about 45 minutes to roll that cylinder. The U.S. fabricator accompanying Bonnay asked why the operator took so many passes. The operator said it boiled down to time and money. Like with thick plate on a press brake, underbending can be corrected easily with another pass, but overbending would be disastrous. Pulling apart such a thick cylinder, he said, may be virtually impossible in some circumstances. Even if it were possible, it would take hours. And the cylinder would make for some expensive scrap; the raw stock in that machine was worth more than $25,000. The operator rolled the plate so preciselywell within the tolerances specified by codethat it made downstream fabrication much easier. An extra 20 to 30 minutes on the roll, he said, allowed for time savings of six to eight hours in downstream fabrication.
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How Thick?
"In the 1980s and 1990s, we saw about only a dozen or so large machines capable of rolling 4 in. thick and up installed around the world," said Davi. "About 10 years ago we began to see increased demand for these heavy machines." He attributed the global demand surge to rising labor costs. Old mechanical machines still work, even after decades of service, but it now costs a lot more to run them. "Four decades ago most machines were mechanical," Davi said, adding that such machines took hours to make just one cylinder. These machines remained in operation as long as labor rates remained sufficiently low. Now, with global labor rates rising, the number of investments in new hydraulic plate rolls is rising, and with it the proliferation of thick plate rolling. With the latest equipment, shops can hot-roll insanely heavy platesmore than a foot thick in some cases. "Heating plate may increase a machine's capacity by 40 to 60 percent, depending on the application," Stasalovich said. But sources noted that the market for such plate is different, because heating prior to rolling changes the plate's mechanical properties. Still, capacities seem to be ever-growing. So how thick can thick plate rolling get? Very. Studies have shown that, at least theoretically, rolls could be designed to process plate up to 20 in. "It's a little unbelievable, but true," Davi said, "but is industry going to be capable of supplying such a plate for that giant monster?" Today's monsters don't cold-roll 20-in.-thick plate, but they can handle 4 to 7 in. just fine, and they're quite a sight. At shops where installers can't dig a pit to place the machinelike near the bayou of Louisianamachines tower over the floor and sometimes require platforms for operator access and plate feeding. Other shops dig pits so deep that plate can be fed via overhead crane virtually at floor level. They're big, awe-inspiring. But most important, they provide designers of the world's infrastructure and powergeneration equipment with another manufacturing option. For heavy fabricators, therein lies opportunity.
Additional Information
Tim Heston
Senior Editor FMA Communications Inc.
833 Featherstone Road Rockford, IL 61107 Phone: 815-381-1314 Contact via email
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Rlcoates
Who remembers Phoenix Steel in Claymont, De. or Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point, md.?
4 months ago Like Reply
http://www.thefabricator.com/article/bending/plate-rolls-keep-rolling-heavier-plate
12/24/2011
Plate rolls keep rolling heavier plate - Bending Tech Cell - TheFabricator.com
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