ArcelorMittal

ArcelorMittal is the world’s leading steel and mining company, with a presence in 60 countries and an industrial footprint in 18 countries. They are the leading supplier of quality steel in the major global steel markets including automotive, construction, household appliances and packaging.

About one fifth of global car production is made from ArcelorMittal steel. The company develops automotive steel products to optimise the weight and cost of vehicles, reduce carbon emissions and ensure high standards of safety. Customers include Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota, PSA Groupe ( incl. Peugeot, Vauxhall, Opel), Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Group, Honda and Volvo.

Mr. Van Oudenhove, Senior Projects Manager at ArcelorMittal Tailored Blanks headquarters in Merelbeke, Belgium, explained that parts in all the plants were being checked with calipers. As new tighter requirements were introduced it became too time consuming to continue using calipers for quality control. Satisfying customer demand meant a new computerised measuring system was a necessity.

According to ArcelorMittal’s Quality Control Technician at the Zaragoza plant “2D full inspection needed expensive CMM equipment, took a long time and wasn’t suitable for the shop floor”. A project was launched to research the solutions available on the market. They saw the Inspecvision Planar machine at Euroblech, the international sheet metal working technology exhibition which takes place in Hanover, Germany.

ArcelorMittal worked closely with InspecVision’s Belgian distributor, Steen Metrology Systems, and installed their first Planar P220.35 machine in 2015 at the plant in Genk, Belgium. The Quality Control Manager at Genk commented “The machine is a helpful tool that measures blank contours in a fast and easy way without programming. The machine is user-friendly, operators can easily check their own production.

Furthermore between 150-300 parts a week are inspected at each AMTB plant. Since installing the Planar machine, inspection time has reduced by “5-10 minutes per part and for complex parts an hour is saved”. Previously they were spending between 13 and 50 hours a week inspecting parts, therefore it wasn’t difficult to justify installing a Planar machine as it provided a “completely different capability of measurement”. AMTB were able to inspect “at least three times more” parts on the Planar machine than was possible with their manual methods.

The Planar machine at Genk had such a positive impact for the business that a further two machines were purchased in 2015 for the plants at Lorraine in France and Gent in Belgium.

The Quality Control Manager at Lorraine commented “with this machine we can check if the overall geometry of a welded blank is within the tolerances that our customers specify”.