Tensile test on hot-rolled heavy steel plates
Spartan UK Ltd, part of the METINVEST Group offers a range of grades suitable for application in numerous industrial sectors from buildings, bridges, industrial machinery, wind turbines, to general construction.
The company has a proud heritage in steel manufacture and the site in Gateshead has undertaken some form of steel plate rolling since the early years of the last century. The company was known as Spartan-Redheugh, part of the Firth Group, until the millennium. In 2001 Gruppo Malacalza of Italy bought the site and set up a new company named Spartan UK. This was acquired by Metinvest in 2008 and has gone from strength to strength under their ownership.
Using the ‘short lead time and customer focused‘ business model, Spartan UK has adapted and improved the strategy to suit its specific markets and consequently has enjoyed an enviable record of growth in sales. The company is currently manufacturing in excess of 220,000 tonnes of product per year.
Quality control with ZwickRoell
Significant capital investment has been made with constant upgrading of equipment and facilities of which the most notable in recent years are two state-of-the-art batch furnaces, and more recently a ZwickRoell materials testing machine.
To control ongoing product quality, the customer needed a new 600 kN testing machine for its laboratory to replace their existing testing machine, where it is used to test hot-rolled steel plates in accordance with ISO 6892-1.
The customer uses the ZwickRoell testing machine for routine quality inspection, in order to control the manufacturing process and product quality, through the application of batch testing.
Parent material taken from the production line is used to produce machined specimens for tensile testing to standard ISO 6892-1. The hot-rolled heavy plate tensile test samples can have specimen thicknesses of up to 35 mm.
Previous to the installation of the ZwickRoell machine, the customer utilised a manually attached, clip-on extensometer for strain measurement. The current use of a makroXtens extensometer enables the customer to perform tensile tests conveniently and quickly and eliminates potential operator error. The acquisition of the new testing system has seen a significant increase in tensile test throughput with test results which are accurate, repeatable, reproducible and traceable.
