Over the past twenty years there has been increasing interest in the surface topography of sheet steel. Four processes are currently in commercial use to texture the rollers used in the production of the sheet and have been the subject of many studies. The aim of this project was to research the combination of ink jet printing technology and chemical and/or electro-chemical machining as an alternative process for the texturing of rollers for sheet steel production. This has resulted in a new process, termed <I>ink-jet texturing. </I>Ink-jet texturing is a subtractive process where a printer is used to deposit an ink mask onto the surface of the roller. This is followed by a chemical or electrochemical machining process which etches those areas not masked to a depth of several micro-metres. Chemical and electro-chemical processes have both been investigated. During the course of the study four pairs of roller were treated for a commercial pilot rolling mill. Sheet samples produced by these rollers have been measured, analysed and discussed in the context of other technologies. The main challenges in the research concerned the accuracy and integrity of the ink mask, the reduction of waviness in the machined surfaces and the interaction between them. The thesis starts with a technological proof of concept using a chemical machining process. The chemical process was subsequently replaced by an electro-chemical one for reasons of speed, cost and environmental responsibility. The majority of the research was concentrated on the electro-chemical texturing (ECT) which culminated with the production of samples of rolled sheet for analysis. Issues of texturing time, cost, wear and reliability have also been investigated to enable the commercial viability to be assessed. Apparatus has been designed, constructed and tested for both chemical and electro-chemical texturing and the results appraised in the context of existing processes. Finally, the potential of the process to work in a commercial environment is examined. The ink jet method offers significant economic savings over competing technologies but real improvements would be required in the repeatability of both masking and machining operations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:659706 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Muhl, Jonathan |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15451 |
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