Tata Steel’s Shotton Works in Deeside, North Wales is benefitting from a £3 million investment to upgrade its two Colorcoat paint lines, improving quality and reducing paint use by 650,000 litres each year.

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.”

Duckworth 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.”

Lead engineer for the project Dave Prytherch explained: “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. 

“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.”

Chris Edwards, technical manager KCS Herr Voss UK Ltd, who provided and installed the equipment, said: “‘This has been a great project to work on because there has been a lot of design input between the team at Shotton and ourselves.

“We’re confident that the installation will increase the potential for cost savings and improve the quality by maximising the consistency of the coating process.”

Commissioning of the new finish coater heads on Colorcoat No.1 line has now been completed, with work on Colorcoat No.2 expected to be completed in June 2023.