Liberty Speciality Steels in Stocksbridge produce high-grade alloy steels available as ingots, blooms, billets, bars for demanding sectors such as Aerospace, Oil & Gas, Industrial Engineering, Automotive and Engineering.
Liberty Steel identified that they could improve the efficiency of the plant if they could more accurately measure the lengths of blooms. With exact measurements, they can optimise the cutting operations downstream and reduce waste when producing bars to precisely meet customers’ orders. The existing equipment in place for length measuring comprised of a pinch roller but due to the harsh environment of the mill, the accuracy and reliability of the measurement was poor.
Mark Hinchcliffe, Electrical Section Engineer at Liberty Steel, Stocksbridge said:
“We were working on an optimisation project and we needed to find a better method of measuring the length of blooms at the exit of the hot mill. When ingots and blooms are cast, they solidify with defects within their microstructure. These defects occur near the top and bottom of the material. This in turn can cause issues when rolling the steel and we also need to take samples for metallurgical tests. For these reasons we crop a discard from both top and bottom of the bloom/billet which requires a measurement. Historically this measurement was made via a pinch roller with direct contact to the material and over the years we have established the size of discard depending on product type. Knowing the inaccuracy of the original measuring method we have overcompensated for errors wasting considerable amounts of good product
We were recommended by our sister plant to contact LIMAB UK as they had previously used their laser systems for successfully measuring hot bar. The idea is that this laser is a much more accurate way of measuring the length of an outgoing bloom/billet from the primary Mill and hence giving a much better yield loss as less good product needs to be cropped.
We had initial concerns about installing a laser system in such an arduous environment as there is a lot heat from the bloom, steam from the mill and fumes from the scarfing machine. Based on their previous experience LIMAB UK were able to provide us assurances that the LaserSpeed installation would be entirely successful as they provided assistance with mounting, positioning and the initial set up.
We have now been running the LaserSpeed for a considerable time and are delighted with the results. Every bar from the mill is measured with mm accuracy and this data is used by our plant optimisation system. The project had paid for itself within 3 months and we had hit half the expected savings by the 6-month mark. The LaserSpeed has been considered a great success to the extent that we have now stopped tracking savings as they are taken as guaranteed following the initial collated data and the proven constancy of the measurement readings.
We have been very impressed with the knowledge and support from LIMAB UK and would have no hesitation in using them for other projects”
