When 20 ton coils of cold metal steel are being processed, despite quality control procedures, there is always the possibility of a fault that could result in costly delays.
The Corus Colors production lines convert the coils, which are each two kilometres long, into pre-finished steels for applications as diverse as roof and wall claddings to consumer products. To understand the reason for any fault and to ensure it does not reoccur, Corus Colors at Shotton, North Wales, use digital video recorders from Videoswitch.
"We have two production lines and have installed 36 cameras overlooking each of them," said Alan Blythe who heads up the on-site electrical engineering team. "We have six Videoswitch DVRs that record and store every image captured by the cameras so that we can quickly and easily review what occurs if and when there is a breakdown in production. This is a big help in root cause analysis. The quality of the images that we can retrieve from the DVRs are excellent and it is particularly useful to be able to easily transfer video of any incident onto a CD."
About the steel firm
Formed in October 1999 through the merger of two European steel manufacturers, British Steel and Koninklijke Hoogovens, Corus provides steel and aluminium. Over 40 years Corus has developed a range of Colorcoat pre-finished steel products.
Alan Blythe added: "We also use CCTV to save time when loading a coil onto the production lines. By using Videoswitch’s VQ-403 quad splitters, we can simultaneously look at images from two cameras to ensure the coil is accurately positioned.”
