A steelworks in North Wales is benefitting from one of the biggest investments on its site in recent years. Tata Steel in Shotton is investing £3m to upgrade its colour coating paint process in a bid to improve quality, make cost savings and reduce paint use by 650,000 litres a year.

The funding will be used to upgrade the coater heads in Tata’s two Colorcoat production lines. Commissioning of the new finish coater heads on the first line has been completed, with work on the second line expected to complete in June.

Lead Engineer for the project Dave Prytherch said: “Coater heads are fundamental to the Colorcoat production process, being used to apply paint to the steel strip substrate. Upgrading them will deliver greater control of the paint application process by improving how the paint is transferred onto the strip, and will give us infinite repeatability.

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“The current coater heads rely on manual adjustments to set the paint thickness, whereas the new heads incorporate a servo motor control, which will provide much greater accuracy and safer hands-free operations.”



New coater heads at Tata Steel’s Shotton works where the Colorcoat brand is produced
New coater heads at Tata Steel’s Shotton works where the Colorcoat brand is produced

Works Manager Bill Duckworth said: “This is one of the biggest investments on the site in recent years and underlines our commitment to ever-improving product quality and to reducing our impact on the environment through minimising our use of materials in line with our recent sustainability commitment.”

He added: “The replacement and upgrading of our paint coater heads and control systems with the latest technology will also mean they can be integrated with on-line measurement technologies.”

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