The colour coating line commissioned at MMK last July is keeping up with the production programme, the MMK Information and Public Relations Administration reports.
The line started commercial production in early August. The equipment's hot trials were combined with filling specific customers' orders and shipment of first lots of finished goods. After two weeks of steady operation the line was shut down for scheduled 3-days' preventive maintenance and then resumed operation. The original production target of 3,000 tons set for August was adjusted upwards and totaled 6,000 of colour coated material. In September the line is already expected to produce 15,000 tons, and starting from October it will reach the design capacity of 17,000 – 18,000 tons. This, to a large extent, will become possible thanks to increased coating speed. If a short while ago it did not exceed 60 m per minute, now it has topped 100 meters.
The August trials programme provided for coating tests of the entire product range, i.e., galvanized and black strip 0.2 – 1.2 mm thick, and achieving the maximum coating speed of 140 m/min.
The line has already been tested for various coating colours, such as bright blue, brown and wine red, with products shipped to customers. Now the process engineers are tackling the hardest colour to produce, the signal white, which requires an impeccable selection of tint gradations.
Foreign specialists are taking an active part in bringing the line up to design capacity, in particular, representatives of the Austrian company VAI, the supplier of the equipment. They are currently engaged in the fine tuning of the painting units. Specialists of some UK and Belgian firms are assisting MMK's process engineers in learning to use a machine for grinding polyurethane rolls and adjusting the operation of drying ovens.
In addition to rigorous product quality control MMK's experts pay much attention to feedback from customers. The first shipments of colour coated strip went to customers in Chelyabinsk, Samara, Izhevsk, Moscow, Yekaterinburg accompanied by teams of engineers from MMK's Central Quality Laboratory and the Quality Control and Acceptance Department. Thus, the process of learning how to make the best use of the line equipment involves not only the equipment suppliers, but also the consumers of the finished product.
|