4 Trends of the Future Steel Rolling Industry

The technological progress of the world's steel rolling industry mainly focuses on the shortening and simplification of the production process, resulting in high-quality rolled products, diversified varieties and specifications, and computerized control and management. In the future, the steel rolling process and technology still need to be developed in the following aspects.

Casting and Rolling Integration

The use of rolls for steel production, because of its continuous, efficient, easy to control by computers, will continue to be the mainstream technology for steel forming in the iron and steel industry for a considerable period of time in the future. But the connection technology between the pre-and post-rolling processes must make great progress.

In the 20th century, due to the development of continuous casting, the blooming process has been phased out. The thin strip steel produced by continuous casting technology is directly cold-rolled, and the continuous casting and hot-rolling processes are combined into one. The integration of casting and rolling will make the rolling process more compact. At the same time, the integration of casting and rolling with low energy consumption and low cost is also the development direction of bar, wire and profile production.

Clean Rolling Process

In the hot rolling process, the oxidation of steel not only consumes steel and energy, but also brings environmental pollution and brings difficulties to deep processing.

Therefore, both the low-oxidation combustion technology and the application of low-cost hydrogen will become the basic technologies for heating billets without oxidation. Pickling and descaling is the biggest source of pollution in cold rolling production. The newly developed acid-free cleaning descaling technology can make the surface of strip steel free of oxides, smooth and have a metallic luster. The emergence of two new technologies, non-oxidation (or low oxidation) and acid-free descaling (iron scale), will also make the steel rolling process cleaner.

Flexible Rolling Process

The application of pressure width adjustment technology and strip shape control technology in strip hot rolling production has realized the free regulation rolling of strip width. The application of rough and medium rolling flat roll technology for the production of rods and wires has realized the free rolling of some specifications of products. Cold bending and welding pipe machines are also available for free-to-size production. These new technologies make the rolling process flexible.

Application of High Technology

The main feature of the significant progress made in steel rolling technology in the 20th century is the application of information technology. The application of high and new technologies such as automatic control of plate shape, free-schedule rolling, high-precision and multi-parameter online comprehensive testing has brought rolling steel production to a new level.

The control of the rolling mill has begun to change from computer model control to artificial intelligence control, and with the development of information technology, the optimization of the production process will be realized, the inventory rate will be reduced, the capital turnover will be accelerated, and finally the cost will be reduced.