Roll shops are areas of steel plants designated to the reconditioning of rolls which wear out during mill campaigns and need to be restored to a specified surface condition before being used again in the mill. The most critical machine in this process is the roll grinder, but the machinery around the roll grinder to allow the whole process to be carried out automatically is important, too. Some of these machines are chocking/ de-chocking machines, chock tilters, transfer cars, texturing machines, cooling stations, and last but not least, automatic loaders and main cranes, which are the subject of this article. All these machines can work as part of a single system driven by a single logic, where decisions are made automatically to implement a specified process. Automatic loaders play an important part in this scheme because they manage the movement of rolls and the flow of information between the different equipment.
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