In the summer of 2018, a customer came to our office. He told us that he wants his products to be exporting to EU countries, whereas the EU has strict restrictions on the square and rectangular tubes produced by direct forming process. hence he has to adopt “round-to-square forming” process for pipe producing. However,he was greatly troubled by one issue–due to the limitation on the share-usage of roller, the rollers in the workshop were piled up like a mountain.
As a professional manufacturer in pipe making industry, we never say no to a customer in need of help. But the difficulty is, how do we achieve share roller usage with ‘round-to-square’ forming? This have not been done by any other manufacturer before! Traditional ‘round-to-square’ process require 1 set of roller for each specification of pipe, even with our ZTF flexible forming method, the best we could do is to share-use 60% of rollers, so to achieve full-line share-roller would seem almost impossible for us to overcome.
After months of design and revise, we finally decided to combine the concept of flexible forming and Turk-head, and turned it into the first prototype design of ‘round-to-square shared roller’ pipe mill. In our design, the frame is relatively stationary with the roller and can slide along the shaft to realize the opening and closing of the specially designed roller, so as to achieve the goal of shared roller. It removed the downtime for switching roller and greatly increased the production efficiency, reduced roller investment and floor occupation, and helped reduce the labor intensity. Workers no longer need to climbing up and down or manually disassemble the roller and shaft. All the work is done by AC motors driven by worm gear and worm wheels.
With the support of advanced mechanical structures, the next step is to carry out intelligent transformation. Based on the combination of mechanical, electronic control, and cloud database systems, we could store the roller positions for each specification with the servo motors. Then Intelligent computer automatically adjust the roller to the correct position, greatly avoid the influence of human factors and improve the control safety.
The prospect of this new technique is very promising. Most people are familiar with the “direct square forming” process, with its biggest advantage of ‘1 set of roller to produce all specifications’. However, beside the pros, its cons are becoming more considerable with stricter market demands, such as its thinner and uneven inner R angle, crack during forming of high grade steel, and its requirement to change additional set of shaft in order to produce round pipe. ZTZG’s ‘round-to-square shared roller forming process’, or XZTF, is built on the logic basis of the round-to-square, so it only needs to realize the roller share-usage of fin-pass section and sizing section to overcome all the deficiencies of “direct square forming” while achieving ‘1 set of roller to produce all specifications’, not just square& rectangular, but also capable of round as well.
ZTZG has been constantly advancing in meeting customer needs and technological innovation and progress. We hope that more people with insight will join hands with us to show the grand vision of high-end pipe manufacturing and intelligent equipment!