Automatic Flaw Inspection and Conditioning System of Steel Billets

Abstract

In Steel production, quality control of semi-finished products such as billets is becoming more and more valuable. To eliminate the surface defects of final products, senmi-finished produts have to be detected and removed the flaw before finish rolling. Usually, magnetic leakage flux (MF) testing methodwas applied to flaw inspection and chipping or grinding operation were added. But, these were all manually operations arid needed long working time. In MF testing method, to recognize the magnetic particle pattern according to flaw shape is needed. We have developped automatic inspection method of this pattern with the aid of computer and handling of billets, cutting control of defects such as cutting machine control, cutting scheduling and quality data gathering are carried out automatically too. Computer control system is organized by one central computer, one mini-computer and several programmable logic controllers. This system contributed the labor reductionof about 250 persons. And, now we can detect the 0.3 mm depth crack entireiy.