Steel cutting market preferences
The most popular methods of cutting steel today utilize oxygen, plasma, laser and water. The first two methods contains almost ninety percent of world sales of machines dedicated for cutting steel. Standard oxy-fueled cutting burners are quite efficient and are able to cut to steel objects up to 300 mm thick. With special industry oxy-gas burners steel can be cutted even up to 2000 mm. On the weaker side of oxygene fueled burners lies quality of edge of final steel details and significant deformations. It cannot be applied also if we predict neccesity of cutting stainless steel, aluminium or copper. And this is big moment when plasma and laser cutters come into the scene. Growing demand on quality products is putting the cutting steel machines market into that direction. So, let’s make some briefly summary of main decision points when we choose right cutting technology for our factory:
- what kind of steel we need to cut
- quality of edge along cut path, distortion, chemical pollution of the edges and geometry of edges.
- cutting line lenght and the complexity degree of shapes of the products
- production approach: manual operator, mechanical or automated process
- maintanace cost: availability and price of service, price of spare parts and it’s durability.
Steel Cutting
Cutting steel is the process of dividing single material sheet thorough its whole thickness. In usual cases desired cutting angle is simply orthogonal to the surface. Within the steel cutting technology main purposes to achieve are: narrow cutting slit, minimize consumption of energy, maximizing the quality of cut edges and limit heat influence over heating area as possible.
We can forge and split steel sheets by using different methods. All of them have their own advantages which makes every of them usable in various situations. It starts from simple, hand operated oxy burners to the highly automated plasma and laser cutting cnc machines which. With mobile oxy burner we can access to places which are not flat or simply shaped or difficult to access with heavy and big machines. CNC steel cutting machines are usually dedicated to precision print into the flat sheet projects prepared before on specialised software. Similarly to ink, laser printers or plotters which make possible for computer drawings to appear on paper, cnc steel cutting machines allow to create very complex details appear real in steel.
Ideal cutting process would allow to separate steel structure on atomic (covalent) bonds alongside given patch without any influence on physical features of cutted material. Steel cutting technology today doesn’t give perfect solution to those conditions and the huge step will be made when nanotechnology come into a game for real.
But also today we can achieve very well results (and usually good enough for most uses) in precision steel cutting by using modern and properly maintained machines or by combining various methods alltogether. As it is not a surprise, well maintanance and servicing is crucial in getting expected results.
types: steel, steel cutting, technology |