sPeCIAL ArABAL - ALUMINIUM-Nachrichten – ALU-WEB.DE

SPECIAL ARABAL
ALUMINIUM INDUSTRY IN THE GULF
The hot-rolling mill will be fed with rolling
slabs, for the production of which Wagstaff
Inc., USA, will supply cutting-edge ingot and
billet casting systems with integrated automated
controls, which have been shown to deliver
improved recovery rates as well as higher
levels of workplace convenience and safety.
The casting facility will also feature Alcoa’s
advanced proprietary ingot casting technology
which provides rolling ingots with a highly improved
surface finish with consequential gains
in rolling efficiency and product quality.
The rolling slabs will be heated in two pusher-type
furnaces from Ebner Industrieofenbau,
Austria. The two ‘Hicon’ pusher furnaces
each hold 30 aluminium rolling slabs of maximum
dimensions 635 x 2,100 x 9,000 mm.
Besides the tried and tested Ebner-specific
Hicon plant components, which are decisively
necessary in order to achieve great temperature
uniformity in the slabs and high energy
efficiency, the most up-to-date process control
has been called for. In that context the twodimensional
temperature computation model
TREATperfect developed by Ebner suits the
purpose admirably. In this, each rolling slab
is computationally divided into individual elements.
Within these elements the heat transfer
in a particular time frame are determined
mathematically.
Throughout the annealing process TREATperfect
compares the pre-calculated temperature
variations with those actually taking
place, and can therefore react to perturbations
or changes of circumstances and adapt
the planned annealing time.
Besides the furnaces, the equipment supplied
by Ebner includes the complete slab handling
system, from slab reception to transfer
of the heat-treated slab onto the roller track
of the hot mill.
The integrated rolling complex, currently
being assembled, consists of a hot-rolling mill
with capacity 650,000 tonnes a year and two
cold-rolling mills. The first cold mill, with a
capacity of 400,000 tonnes of aluminium strip,
serves to produce food-grade can stock which
has many applications including the manufacture
of beverage cans. The second cold mill
has a capacity of more than 150,000 tonnes
and mainly produces high-grade strip for
the automobile industry. The new plant will
not just boost the creation of a local further
processing industry. Thanks to its geo-strategically
favourable position the investors surely
also have their sights on growth markets for
aluminium flat products which are capable of
development, e. g. in the Middle East.
The main supplier of the complete integrated
hot and cold rolling plant, including its electric
and automation systems, is SMS Siemag.
For the hot-rolling plant SMS Siemag is
supplying the complete 1 + 4 pre-rolling and
finishing line. The pre-rolling section consists
of a quarto preliminary stand which rolls down
the in-coming aluminium slabs up to 635 mm
thick and weighing up to 32.5 tonnes. The
preliminary line also includes a heavy and
light hydraulic cropping shear for intermediate
cropping and for removing the leading and
trailing ends of the preliminary strip.
The quarto-designed four-stand hot finishing
line rolls the preliminary strip coming in
with a thickness of about 30 mm, down to
final thickness of 2 to 7 mm in a single pass.
In the run-out area of the finishing line the
finished strip is trimmed and taken up by a
hot-strip spool with belt wrapper.
After the hot mill the plant has two coldrolling
lines, designed for the production of
various strip qualities.
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