Steel coil packaging is an important protective measure for steel coil storage and transportation. Steel companies in industrially developed countries attach great importance to steel coil packaging, raising it to the level of “ensuring safe storage and transportation, improving product quality”, they developed complete steel coil packaging technology and equipment, and basically realizing the automation of steel coil packaging.
Traditional steel coil packaging is a manual operation, which has the fatal weakness of low production efficiency and high labor intensity for workers. In particular, with the increase in rolling speed, the capacity of newly built cold rolling production lines is in the million-ton range, and low-efficiency manual packaging cannot meet production requirements at all.
Calculated based on a steel coil packaging speed of 40 coils per hour. If manual packaging is used, the packaging time for each roll is calculated as 15 minutes, and at least 10 groups of packaging stations must be set up. Each group of stations must be equipped with at least 4 workers per shift, for a total of 40 workers. If mechanized packaging is adopted, two sets of packaging units (currently, the maximum production capacity of the packaging unit is 24 rolls/hour) can meet the packaging speed requirements. For a fully automatic packaging unit, each unit only needs 2 to 3 workers per shift, a total of 4 to 6 workers; while for a semi-automatic packaging unit, each unit needs 7 to 8 workers per shift, a total of 14 to 16 workers.
Simply looking at the above data, many people will have this idea: Although manual packaging takes a long time, as long as more packaging stations and workers are added, the production speed requirements can be met. This is one of the reasons why many steel production companies consider manual packaging. In fact, the calculation premise of the above data is problematic, because it is invalid to set up 10 groups of packaging stations in the manual packaging area. The reason for the inefficiency is that manual packaging requires the cooperation of the crane in the workshop, and the crane cannot hoist the steel coils of these 10 stations at the same time. Moreover, the driving in the workshop is not designed based on packaging needs. Therefore, it can be said with certainty that it is impossible for manual packaging to meet such a production speed without adding special lifting equipment (one for each group of workstations).
In fact, as long as manual packaging is completed with the help of the hoist(even if there is only one station), it will increase the burden on the hoist and often cause blockage, causing the steel coils after the production line to be unable to be packaged in time and stranded in the production area; the finished rolls after packaging cannot be put into storage and shipped in time. Therefore, manual packaging, a backward packaging technology, will definitely become a “bottleneck” that restricts enterprises from improving production efficiency. If steel coil manufacturers want to ensure both product output and quality, they must implement mechanization and automation in the steel coil packaging process.