lueScope Steel Limited, an integrated producer with an international reach, has its largest operation in the industrial harbor town of Port Kembla, New South Wales, Australia. Major products include steel slab; hot-rolled, cold-rolled and coated coil; plate; automotive sheet; galvanized; Zincalume coated steel; and Colorbond pre-painted steel.
The company has seen rapid growth in demand for stretch-leveled steel and has had to periodically upgrade and expand its production capacity in order to meet that demand. The latest purchase and installation is a cut-to-length line with an in-line stretch-leveler. Spain’s Athader S.L. built the CTL-1800×6 strip transport, cutting, stacking and packing equipment while West Virginia-based Leveltek Processing LLC built the stretch-leveling equipment for the project.
“In our Port Kembla business in 2014, we installed a CTL/stretch-leveling line supplied by Leveltek/Bradbury,” says John Fish, engineering manager for BlueScope’s Hot Mills, referring to Bradbury Group, which has a joint venture with Athader and other metalforming machinery builders.
The line BlueScope installed in 2014 covers gauges from 2 mm to 16 mm, 1,550 mm wide, up to 12 meters long, and processes carbon steel grades up to 350GR. “This line was upgraded by Athader in 2016 to add a fully automated packaging line to improve production rates. This line is still in service, and it’s operating at 100 percent capacity with a product focus on the heavier gauges,” according to Fish.
“Domestic supply of our premium coil plate product also displaced previously imported products,” increasing BlueScope’s market share, he continues.
The new line processes carbon steel grades up to 350Gr including floor plate (tread plate) and pickled and oiled material.
“We also upgraded our leveling capability and added an improved automated stacker for better quality and pack shape. Other significant upgrades made to support higher productivity rates included a de-banding robot, a high-speed flying shear, semi-automated wrapping dispenser and higher speed pack stacking crane.”
Fish notes that this line may be the first high-speed CTL stretching line “where a stretch-leveler has been direct coupled to a high-speed flying shear.”
He says construction was completed “without issue,” which BlueScope was able to achieve in large part because all of the necessary detailed design and other support information was in hand.
“We increased our project commissioning resources with some young engineers and set up a process with our [machinery building partners] to provide remote support in a timely manner,” he says. Online meetings were conducted to provide progress updates and address any specific needs.
“The end result was very successful with a real collaboration between BlueScope, Athader and Leveltek that allowed us to fully commission the line and achieve an excellent start-up within the original project schedule,” Fish says, noting that the quality of the equipment itself was a crucial element in that success.
He is pleased with the safe access systems, including the automation of “typically manual tasks such as strap de-banding and dunnage handling,” which has enabled the company to provide a safe operating environment, particularly for new operators who may, at first, be unfamiliar with the functioning of a high-speed processing line.
The premium quality stretch-leveled products have provided new market opportunities with customers that are developing new or more cost-efficient applications in their own markets, “driven by better memory-free and dimensionally very accurate product,” Fish says.
The new capacity reflects BlueScope’s backward integration strategy, which it undertook in recent years as a way to “relocate processing line capability closer to the feed source of our hot-strip mill.”
In addition to producing premium cut-to-length flat sheet and plate, BlueScope has welded beam, skin pass, slitting, coiled plate and flat bar processing capability within its integrated complex at Port Kembla.
BlueScope Steel LLC, Melbourne, Australia, +61 3 9666 4000, bluescope.com.
Bradbury Group, Moundridge, Kansas, 800/397-6394, bradburygroup.com.