Tinplate lines

The reversing cold rolling mill is the all-rounder among the cold rolling mills: Here, thin strips, thick strips, soft grades, high-strength and ultra-high-strength strips can be rolled in succession on one and the same plant. If you want to produce small to medium batch sizes of certain products, this line is a highly efficient option. Depending on your product mix and the installed rolling technology, the capacity ranges from about 100,000 to 500,000 t/ year.

The batch Tandem Cold Mill is for higher production volumes and offers considerable advantages and makes production planning flexible. To increase the yield, we have developed a number of trend-setting technical features in recent years. Included here is our threading assistance system TRC^®. Using our engineering expertise, we offer you customized, efficient greenfield or revamp designs to ensure you get the most out of your mill. Needless to say, we can easily retrofit all our newly developed features.

A special feature of tinplate production is the second rolling step for thickness reduction after annealing. Running parallel to this is a temper rolling process that prepares the strip for further surface finishing and coating. Our twin-stand double cold reduction mills (DCR) combine reduction rolling and skin-passing in a single mill. First up is thickness reduction in one stand, followed by skin-passing in the second stand. This ensures precise material properties and surface roughness of the tinplate and guarantees smooth further processing. You can rely on the best results from our DCR mills in CVC^® plus design. They achieve excellent strip quality with proven technical solutions such as our new enhanced bending system for an extremely large roll gap range, multizone cooling, and Dry Strip system (DS system). A further advantage is that these mills can be operated in dry and wet tempering modes. Depending on the required capacity and product mix, we offer you DCR mills for batch as well as continuous inline operation in tinplate production lines.

The annealing of the cleaned strip followed by reduction and surface treatment provides the material in the annealing line with the material and surface properties necessary for tinning and subsequent processing. The very thin material (up to 0.1mm) is processed on the lines at very high speeds (up to 750 m/min). The product range comprises all grades and also contains the qualities T2.5, T5 and DR 10, which cannot be produced by batch annealing. The strip cleaning section has efficient process components including spray and electrolytic cleaning cells. The radiant tube furnace is the heart of the plant and is recognized for its low resource consumption. Due to precise furnace control, the process follows the specified annealing curve exactly. Two 4-high skinpass mill stands are integrated for post-treatment. The first skinpass mill stand adjusts the mechanical-engineering characteristics of the strip by a thickness reduction. The second creates a defined strip surface structure.

The significant process steps in an electrolytic tinning line are cleaning, leveling, pickling, tinplating, remelting and passivating. All of these process steps must fulfill high requirements in order to guarantee the surface quality of the end material. SMS offers various innovative technologies for tinning lines, which increase the ecological and economic efficiency of the plant.