French stainless steel wire rod producer Ugitech has awarded the Final Acceptance Certificate (FAC) to Primetals Technologies for its custom engineering solution to upgrade and automate the compacting and coil handling process in the company’s rod mill, which recently achieved all performance goals.
The upgrade for its stainless steel rod mill in Ugine, France includes a new vertical compactor and unloading station design which allows the automatic loading of loose coils from a floor mounted cradle onto a vertical compacting system, replacing a former manually operated secondary processing system. The previous horizontal compacting system was very slow and did not provide the necessary coil package for efficient downstream processing. The novel solution also includes a special feature located after the shot blast process, which delivers a denser coil package prior to compacting. The system is fully automatic without a dedicated operator, where fork truck drivers simply drop off loose coils at a loading station and pick up compacted coils from an unloading station. The new system processes a 1.1-ton coil scratch-free with four wire tie bindings every two minutes with a variable compactor force range of 2 to 20 tons.