When twenty-ton coils of cold metal steel are being processed, despite stringent quality control procedures, there is always the possibility of a fault occurring 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, have invested in digital video recorders from Videoswitch.
"We currently 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 6 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."
Formed in October 1999 through the merger of two major European steel manufacturers, British Steel and Koninklijke Hoogovens, Corus provides steel and aluminum solutions worldwide. Over the course of 40 years Corus has developed a range of technically leading Colorcoat® pre-finished steel products which have been comprehensively tested and are manufactured to the highest quality standards.
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".
