2B Industry Applications Automated Cleaning of Rim Stock

Abstract

Pickling hot-rolled steel to remove the scale and rust is an ecologically undesirable operation that is poorly adaptable to automation. This leads the manufacturing engineer to look to other more suitable processes in order to automate successfully. Hot-rolled wrought steel sections used for truck rims were generally pickled in the usual manner. In order to automate the handling of these extremely heavy pieces a grit-blasting process was selected. An unscramble/orienter accepts the bundles of pieces from the mill and feeds them one at a time to the blast chamber. Clean parts emerge continuously from the cleaning process onto an accumulator/transfer table and are fed to an automatic strapper for bundling or directly in single file to the rim rollers and welders as production requires. Case Study: Courtesy, Automation Development Corp. and Automation for Industry.