TPT November 2009

T ube M ills and R oll F orming L ines

Tube mills from Taiyuan Heavy Industry In addition, TYHI has produced a high amount of seamless tube equipment such as Ø140mm, Ø170mm, Ø180mm, Ø340mm and Ø460mm in co-operation with SMS Meer and Danieli. It has exported two sets of Ø177 PQF seamless tube production line equipment and one set of Ø340mm FQM seamless tube production line equipment to India.

RAFTER Equipment Corporation, USA, manufactures welded-seam tube and pipe mills, roll forming machines, cut- off machines, auxiliary and other related tube and pipe mill machinery. Additional services include rebuilding and upgrading mill equipment. With the current economic downturn, Rafter’s efforts have been mainly focused on mill retrofits and upgrades. Over the last few years, the company has developed a simple yet effective accessory for controlling the location of the weld seam during production on a tube or pipe mill: a seam orientation unit. One example was installed at a prominent North American facility for the production of up to 5.563" (140mm) OD x 0.375" (9.5mm) API line pipe. The seam orientation unit is used to maintain the proper seam location for subsequent online non-destructive testing. The customer reports that “[the machine operators] are very happy with the performance of the [unit]. According to the cut-off operator, who also operates the turkshead [straightener], once they got it adjusted correctly and it was holding the seam between 11 o’clock and 12 o’clock, they have not produced a single piece of crooked pipe. This is extremely out of the ordinary for [us]. They are usually making frequent adjustments to the turkshead to correct [for] crooked pipe.” TAIYUAN Heavy Industry Co Ltd (TYHI) claims to be one of the largest suppliers of seamless tube plant in China. Since its establishment in 1950, it has consecutively supplied more than 1,000 sets of steel rolling equipment for metallurgical enterprises and other industrial sectors to users from home and abroad. Seamless tube equipment manufactured by THYI mainly includes piercing mill, hot rolling mills (three roll and two roll), centralised differential reducing mills and reducing mills with separate drive, sizing mills, straightening machines. In the past decade, TYHI has designed and manufactured Ø140mm, Ø159mm, Ø219mm, Ø273mm, Ø325mm, Ø630mm, Ø720mm and Ø1,200mm seamless steel tube production lines.

designed 16MN, 35MN and 63MN steel tube extrusion presses. TYHI says it is the largest manufacturer for spirally welded pipe equipment as well as seamless tube plant and so far has supplied more than 10 sets of spirally welded pipe production lines, among which one set has been exported to India. Taiyuan Heavy Industry Co Ltd – China Fax: +86 351 6360994 Email: janiceemail@163.com Website: www.tyhi.com www.read-tpt.com Read this magazine online @:

TYHI has also recently developed and supplied Ø180mm three-roll seamless tube continuous rolling mill completely by itself. It says this will help it to become the third biggest supplier in the world for the complete set of hot continuous rolling mills, behind SMS and Danieli. TYHI is capable of the design and manufacture of extrusion forming equipment of seamless tube as well. So far it has

Seam orientation units for all types of tubes The seam orientation unit features remote powered adjustment that allows the operator to control the seam location from a downstream station. require that the weld seam be located on a corner while others may require it to be located on a flat.

Rafter seam orientation units have been successfully installed on smaller laser-weld mills producing austenitic stainless steel tube, as well as larger 10" (250mm) square mills making HSS. Rafter Equipment Corporation – USA Fax: +1 440 572 3703 Email: sales@rafterequipment.com Website: www.rafterequipment.com

This is beneficial, since the effects of the adjustment are not immediately apparent – it takes a few moments for the seam to relocate itself. The seam orientation unit is also useful to producers of hollow structural sections (HSS) for locating the weld seam prior to reshaping the tube into various square and rectangular shapes. Some HSS producers

 RT-5500S seam orientation unit

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N ovember 2009

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