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How is plate aluminium made?

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• How is plate aluminium made?

• How is plate aluminium made?

  hmwadeseo > 02-21-2023, 09:20 AM

  It’s all about the rolling. The process starts with a pre-heated sheet ingot weighing as much as 20 tons, typically around 6 feet wide, 20 feet long, and over two feet thick. The ingot is heated to something called rolling temperature before being carefully fed into a breakdown mill to be rolled to and fro until it’s a few centimetres thick.
  

  After this the slab that’s been created can be cold-rolled without heat, or heat-treated to boost the strength. The strongest alloys of all are heat-treated, quickly cooled to room temperature, then stretched to straighten the metal and fix any internal stresses and strains generated by the rolling and heat-treating processes.

  

  The plate aluminium is then either ‘aged’ naturally at room temperature, or aged artificially via a furnace. This develops the combination of strength and anti-corrosion the metal is so well know for. Last of all it’s trimmed to size either ready for sale or to be machined into a final product.

  Aluminium sheet and foil are often made much the same way, but the metal slab is sent through a continuous mill to reduce the thickness before being wound into a coil. These vast coils are cold-rolled several times and can also be re-heated to give the final product the mechanical properties required. Alternatively sheet and foil can be made via continuous casting, where melted metal in a caster generates hot rolled coils without all the casting and hot rolling.
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