A novel apparatus method which provides valuable information about the condition of the hot dip melt pot snout and steel coating process which may be used to improve the quality of the produced coated steel. In hot dipped melt processes, there is a lot of room for things to go wrong. While they may not be fully apparent right from the beginning, the effects become very noticeable in the end product resulting from the melt process when the quality of production suffers. The issues can range significantly from contaminants to flow consistency to rippling to environmental conditions. Without seeing these issues as they are occurring, a production team may be left to realize the quality problem at the end of the “pipeline,” essentially resulting in a potential waste run and a lot of expensive trial and error getting things to align correctly. The patented Snout Vision™ provides an infrared snout view without secondary illumination.
Getting to the Heart of the Issue
One of the key factors in quality control is the actual point of flow, the hot-dipped melt pot snout where the flow coalesces and transfers to the recipient channel or container. This particular point can be the source of a lot of melt flow deviations and problems that then appear in cooling with malformation, striping, chipping etc. during the production process. It matters greatly in the manufacturing of coated steel as an inadequate layer then creates the risk of downstream failure or imperfect layering in the end product. It’s also a point of transfer where contamination can occur, which in turn can also affect the end product as well.
A Unique Insight to the Actual Hot-Dipped Transfer Moment
The Hot-Dipped Snout Vision™ is a novel approach in which a good amount of test information and potential production risk can be identified and gathered before an industrial manufacturer runs a significant amount of material and finds out the hard way it was a waste of time. This testing and quality control feature essentially provides a valuable evaluation through multiple sensors in the flow environment, giving an observer a real-time understanding of what’s occurring with a given hot-dipped snout unit.
The evaluation is applied through simultaneous and subsequent wavelength measurements which produces various benchmark readings as well actual variation readings. From this information one can see the impact of a clean surface flow, a tube-break as it occurs and what it looks like, how contamination will appear and from where, and chip surface scratching as well. Additionally, one can see the effect of gravity in a flow as it begins to create a cavitating effect in a flow and what bubbling can result in as well. Ideally, the approach then gives manufacturers key insight into how to keep a hot-dipped melt flow process clean, consistent, and free of interference as well as why. The information is extremely useful both for production quality control as well as operations training.
Getting Ahead of the Curve
Because the focus is on the flow of the production generation in the first place, corrections and improvements can be made based on Connors Industrials’ Snout Vision™ insight not possible with other evaluation methods. And that can result in significant operational savings in the big picture with better information up front rather than mistakes and hard lessons after the fact. To find out more about how Hot-dipped Snout Vision™ can be applied within a given process or build system, contact our team for more information. We would be glad to dive into the details and determine how Connors Industrials can make your manufacturing better exponentially with higher quality control.