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ITA Award Winner 2018
Tecnar Automation Ltee
Novel signal processing of on-line wall thickness gauge pro les for production monitoring of hot seamless steel tube plants
Fig. 1 Lut revolution
INTRODUCTION
Seamless tube manufacturers are under constant pressure to increase yield and productivity of their plants, especially in the current dif cult times. Proper process monitoring at every stage of the manufacturing steps is critical in achieving such goals. For seamless tube manufactur- ing, in particular, there are constant changes in production results due to the unavoidable wear of the production tools. Getting a complete picture of the production process requires the inspection of each and every tube produced at several stages of the manufacturing process. Operators may then be automatically alerted before tube character- istics, such as dimension or temperature, falls outside target ranges. By tracking the slow changes in production parameters due to wear, maintenance may then be planned on demand, instead of on schedule (after a given number of tube produced). In other words, earlier insight changes everything.
Valuable information is provided to plant operators and plant manager by sensors located at critical locations on the production line. Tecnar’s Lut Revolution (Lut) is one such sensor. The Lut revolution gauge, shown in Figure 1, is a noncontact ultrasonic wall thickness, tempera- ture and length measurement system, speci cally designed for process monitoring of hot seamless steel tube production. The wall thickness measurement is based on laser-ultrasonics, which is a novel versatile technology, compatible with every stage of the production process. The Lut may be used immediately after piercing of the billet all the way up to the output of the sizing mill, from the beginning to the end of the hot seamless tube manufacturing process.
Since the sensor is based on noncontact ultrasonics, the presence of the mandrel inside the tube as well as tube motion (both forward, rota- tional and lateral) has no effect on the capability and on the accuracy of the measurements. The Lut has been speci cally designed for use in the harsh condition of a tube mill. By introducing new analytical tool to process the data from the Lut, operators and production manag- ers may quickly understand what’s going on the production mill, react quickly to out-of-speci cations conditions, and reach their production goals.
THE LUT REVOLUTION
The Lut Revolution, shown in Figure 1 at the output of a stretch-reduc- ing-mill, is a sensor based on laser-ultrasonics. Laser-ultrasonics is a technology that combines the accuracy of ultrasonic thickness gauge with the exibility of an optical system. A rst laser is focused on the surface of the tube, causing the generation of short ultrasonic pulse or
ITAtube Journal No2/July 2018
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