Metallic strips are everywhere in your world, even if you don’t see them. They’re in clocks, older thermostats, cars, and all manner of electronic gadgets. Their ubiquity demands precise manufacturing techniques. Those strips have come a long way since 1759, which is when John Harrison first used a bimetallic strip in his clock to compensate for temperature changes. Technology is essential for creating metallic strips, and because metal strips play such a significant role in quality assurance systems, it’s essential to know how they work.
Thickness Measurement
When dealing with tight tolerances, the margin for error is infinitesimal. That’s why exceptional quality assurance is essential. High-tech quality assurance includes measuring tools that examine the strips themselves and measuring tools that assess the primary measuring tools themselves.
Tensile Strength and Yield Strength
Without the right kind of technology to measure tensile strength and yield strength, you’d have to subject each strip to force that would break it. That would defeat the purpose of manufacturing the strips in the first place. Instead, you need nondestructive methods of measuring these two essential characteristics. The chief method is magnetic induction, a technology based on the relationship between the mechanical and magnetic properties of the materials used in the creation of the strip.
Strip Stabilization
High-speed lines travel at or above 15 meters per second. That translates to roughly 33 miles per hour. Steel is heavy, and even in strip form, at 490 pounds per cubic foot, a strip flying through the air at 33 mph will be quite destructive to both the high-speed line and other nearby machines. Therefore, the stabilization of the strips during manufacture is crucial. The technology for this purpose includes electromagnetic processes that hold the strip in place as it’s manufactured.
Protecting the Strip Edges
The strip traveling at 33 mph could damage itself if it strays even the slightest amount from the correct position within the production machine. To protect the edges, the machine will cover the strip with zinc, the thickness of which is controlled by a piece of technology called an air knife.
Air knives blow compressed air at the strip while it’s being formed. They can be programmed to make the zinc coating as thick or thin as necessary within the parameters of the strip characteristics. Air knives are also adjustable, and for quality assurance of a wide variety of strips of different widths, that programming is automatic and done by hyper-accurate sensors.
Additional Measurement Devices
Strips have all sorts of characteristics, such as roughness, slit width, and oil layers. To maintain quality assurance, each of these characteristics requires a separate piece of technology to manage them. For example, you wouldn’t use a device for oil layer measurement to measure roughness.
All aspects of metallic strip production require quality assurance oversight. To be successful, tolerances must be measured precisely and accurately. The machines’ technology is an integral part of the quality assurance and actual manufacturing processes.
Published By: Aize Perez
