IPSCO Steel, Axis, Alabama – A rolling stand at IPSCO Steel consistently under-performed – it was unable to reduce six-inch thick slabs by the 1.25 inches desired. Engineers suspected the drive motors might be the cause. Before making this claim to the motor manufacturer they wanted to test their theory by measuring the torque on the spindle shafts.
They installed Binsfeld torque telemetry with Micro-Measurements strain gages to transmit live torque data from the spindle shafts.
The spindle shaft torque measurements verified that the motor was the problem. IPSCO shared their data with the motor manufacturer who was then able to tune the drives and nearly double the output power. This eliminated a costly bottleneck in IPSCO’s production process, returning them to full operation.