PROJECT OVERVIEW

NoStickRolls is a European funded project coordinated by RINA Consulting – Centro Sviluppo Materiali S.p.A., involving seven partners.

The research project aims to prolong the service life of furnace rolls working in continuous annealing and galvanizing lines (CAL & CGL), bringing reduction of maintenance costs and increase of productivity by lengthening time-to-maintenance, and to improve the quality of steel strips with respect to surface defects that arise because of wear and build-up of oxides from steel product picked up by roll’s surface. The most challenging issues regarding pick-up formation have arisen since the need to increase strip's running speed and/or annealing temperature and the need to process critical steel products for automotive industry, such as advanced high strength steels containing elevated levels of Mn and/or Si.

The Projects objectives will be achieved by a stepwise methodological approach intended to:

• acquire knowledge on the thermochemical interaction phenomena occurring between materials in contact (furnace rolls/strip strip) as a function of process variables that affect of pick-up formation in industrial cases;
• design and develop improved coating solutions using a combination of new material composition and/or new coating concepts (i.e. functionally graded coatings, multiple layered) and/or advanced and new in the field deposition techniques able to tailor all the necessary coating properties;
• test the surface properties of roll materials, such as pick-up, wear and thermal shock resistance, with a variety of laboratory and pilot plant in house developped testing facilities;
• scale-up and validate the most promising coating solutions compared to currently used roll materials by industrial trials in CAl and CGL.