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ALUMINIUM ROLLING INDUSTRY
Alro commissions new cold finishing lines supplied by Salico
Aluminium producer and manufacturer
Alro SA has started operation of its
newly built cold finishing facilities at its
rolling plant in Slatina, Romania. The
€10 million (RON43.6m) investment is
aimed at increasing the mill’s productivity
and thus strengthening its international
competitiveness. The project, which was
started in March 2011, comprises tension
levelling, cut-to-length and slitting
lines. The company is majority owned by
the globally integrated aluminium group
Vimetco.
The new finishing facilities in Slatina include
state-of-the-art tension levelling, cut-to-length
and slitting lines, all of them supplied by Salico.
The lines process aluminium strip, mainly
5xxx alloys, in widths up to 1,650 mm and
a thickness range from 0.3 to 6.35 mm. The
new equipment has been in operation since
mid-September and has met all performance
and capacity requirements. With the new lines,
Alro will be able to offer a wide range of strip
thicknesses between 0.3 and 300 mm covering
all products from sheet, coil, slits, shapes
and plate. It has a production capacity of
120,000 tpy of finished products.
Tension levelling line
The centrepiece of the new equipment, the
tension leveller unit, features an ‘all electric’
drive system for the tension bridles with a
non-contact laser speed measurement system
and a heavy-duty cassette leveller as the main
components.
Eccentric rotary shear – ‘sheet tronic’
Tension levelling section
An intelligent arrangement of the cluster of
rolls of each cassette minimises friction for
the thinnest materials. At the same time, it
offers adequate stiffness to process heavier
thicknesses of hard alloys, and together with
an automatic disconnection system for the bridle
rolls this allows a very large range of strip
thicknesses to be processed.
The line is equipped with an automatic
spool handling system, edge trimming section,
double-die Salico stitching machine and
an inspection stand.
Particular effort has been devoted to the
design of the roll-cleaning systems, with motorised
cleaning devices for the entry and exit
deflector rolls and all the bridle rolls, as well
as an advanced lubricant spraying device for
the elongation and levelling sections of the
leveller.
Cut-to-length line
The cut-to-length line cuts the entry coils into
sheet up to six metres in length at a maximum
speed of 80 m/min. The main components are
a multiroller leveller, paper and plastic application
devices, an eccentric rotary shear and
a vacuum stacker. The leveller ensures that
the cut sheets have the proper flatness, with a
maximum of half the tolerance permitted by
the relevant European standard.
Preparation of the interleaving paper is carried
out easily and ergonomically by the operators
offline. Feeding the paper into the line
and under the aluminium strip is accomplished
fully automatically without intervention of the
operator.
The eccentric rotary shear is the patented
Salico ‘sheet-tronic’ shear, which has been
sold worldwide more than 200 times. A highly
dynamic and well balanced unit allows the
sheet to be cut with a high degree of accuracy:
the tolerance is less than 0.2 mm at the highest
speed with up to 160 cuts per minute. The
shear also features a camber-compensation
system that permits angular adjustment of the
complete unit in order to cut within the tolerance
even when the strip has a severe camber
defect on entry.
Stacking is accomplished using a zero-inertia
vacuum stacker based on a concept introduced
by Salico many years ago. It is performed
when the sheets are not moving: the
stacker belts are stopped at the very moment
when the stacking position has been reached.
This approach allows the cut sheets to fall vertically
onto the packing without any risk of
slippage, and therefore without any surface
damage even with the softest and most sensi-
© Salico
46 ALUMINIUM · 11/2013