Cold Rolled Plate

The manufacturing of cold rolled (CR) plates is a pretty long process that is split into several stages. The first stage involves manufacturing of the hot rolled steel. In this stage, pig iron is prepared in a blast furnace through reaction of mixture of coke and iron ore. The pig iron is then made to pass through a converter and continuous casting equipment to generate a slab style steel product, which is passed through a hot rolling mill (containing pairs of rolls) and pickled through a pickling line.

The second stage involves the cold rolling process, where such hot rolled pickled steel products are cooled down by maintaining the temperature (of steel metal) below its re-crystallisation temperature (mostly it is the room temperature) and passing them via cold reduction mill (to reduce thickness and obtain uniformity). The resulting cold rolled plates possess immense impact strength (due to strain hardening) and may be a bit hard to exhibit less formability.

To increase the formability nature of the CR plate, it is necessary to make them go through the annealing process, which involves reheating at higher temperatures. This is the third and final stage in the entire manufacturing process of CR plates. This long procedure results in highly refined steel, that is in great demand for use in the chemical and automobile industries.

The cold rolled steel plates contain lower carbon content than the hot rolled steel, which makes them slightly more durable. The cold rolled plates are also smaller in size as well as exhibit less formability than their hot rolled counterparts.