Aluminum roller increases quality and yield with surface inspection system

Situation

Hulamin is an aluminum roller in sub-Saharan Africa, supplying customers around the world with aluminum sheet, plate, and foil products. The manufacturer’s biggest range of products is can stock, which includes can-body stock, tab stock, and coated can-end stock, which it has supplied to independent and multinational canmakers for more than 30 years. In addition to supplying the South African market, Hulamin has significant exports to Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia.

The can stock market is considered to be one of the most demanding packaging markets in the world. To maintain good working relationships with customers and supply chain partners, Hulamin works to provide products of consistent high quality.

Historically, however, a significant number of surface defects would appear during the manufacturing process, from the hot and cold rolling mills to the finishing machine centers. These defects can originate in the raw material (ingot phase) or be created during the rolling or coating processes. Hulamin employees inspected the material manually at each machine center using physical sampling, and the defects they found led to coils having to be finished with low yields or scrapped completely.

Hulamin General Manager Tim Hawkins said, “As a responsible supplier, Hulamin naturally wanted to drive down waste to the absolute minimum. We visited several global service providers looking for a solution that could achieve the reduction of energy, production costs, and waste products while also increasing the quality of product.”

Resolution

The aluminum roller decided to implement Ametek Surface Vision’s SmartView® surface inspection system to help ensure the consistent high quality of its products. This surface detection platform combines synchronized camera technology, software, and lighting to capture defect images across multiple inspection angles, delivering accurate monitoring, gauging, reporting, and classification in real time.

Taking advantage of the system’s flexible, scalable nature, Hulamin installed the system over several years, enabling the company to spread the capital expenditure cost over that period. Today the system provides automated monitoring from the hot strip mill to the slitting and coating lines. Information is saved in an SQL database, allowing for postproduction tracking using Ametek’s Production Quality Advisor software suite.

The system is fully integrated with the aluminum roller’s in-house data management software to help ensure seamless data connectivity and exchange. The streaming video software also allows Hulamin to review a coil at any time without uncoiling and recoiling the material—which saves time when checking product quality.

Extra production assurance ensures that defective coils are not dispatched. If customer complaints arise after shipping, the company also has access to data regarding the coil’s condition when it was supplied.

Since the system was installed, it has increased the company’s yield by 4 percent over four years, while increasing customer satisfaction despite producing increasingly complex products.

Hulamin Surface Engineer Dominic Moreno noted, “[The system’s] real-time information has proved invaluable for problem solving. By eliminating the reliance on postproduction physical strip inspection, we were able to overcome our most significant hurdles.

“For example, online inspection allows us to monitor and troubleshoot our strip in midproduction, so the hot rolling mill can now be stopped after the second coil—because the process demands that the mill has to finish the existing coil and the next coil, which is already prepared—removing the substandard coil from the process at an early stage.

“Now integrated into our production process, troubleshooting and efficiency are at the heart of our operations. This neatly positions us to produce more demanding products.”

Ametek Surface Vision

www.ameteksurfacevision.com