David L. Anderson, Metals Industry Manager, InfoSight Corporation
Walt N. Arth, Engineering Manager, InfoSight Corporation

Steel slab manufacturers are required to accurately identify their slabs both for internal record-keeping purposes, and to provide proper slab identification for their customers. This slab mark provides identity and traceability for each slab, thus enabling the manufacturer and the end-user to determine the manufacturing origin and process pedigree of the slab, typically starting at the Heat/Strand/Cut level.

Technology is now available that enables bar code identification to be created “on-site and on-demand” and to be automatically attached to cold or hot carbon steel slabs by laser marking a tag and MIG-welding the tag onto the slab face. The tag can be marked with text, graphic images and bar codes. The inherently high contrast nature of black laser marking on the smooth surface of the white tag background eliminates variations in slab torchcut surface appearance that would otherwise preclude bar code marking. This leads to reliable bar code reading that can be performed using low cost commercially available bar code scanners. The addition of this laser marked identification further enables the use of downstream bar code reading systems to scan the bar code for identification of the slabs at key manufacturing nodes, and also enables the ability to automatically update the database with manufacturing process results at these nodes on a slab-by-slab basis.

Read the entire white paper "Bar Code Identification of SeverStal Slabs" at InfoSight.com  (*PDF Format, 500KB)