Cold Rolled Carbon Steel Strip

Cold rolled sheet products have been available for many years and are used for a multitude of applications such as appliances – refrigerators, washers, dryers, and other small appliances, automobiles – exposed as well as unexposed parts, electric motors, and bathtubs. Today’s cold rolled sheet products are much improved over those used in the past. They offer better control of thickness, shape, width, surface finish, and other special quality features that compliment the emerging need for highly engineered end use applications. To meet the various end use requirements, cold-rolled sheet products are metallurgically designed to provide specific attributes such as high formability, deep drawability, high strength, high dent resistance, good magnetic properties, enamelability, and paintability.

The first step in manufacturing Cold Rolled Sheet Products involves cold reducing coils of hot-rolled, pickled product to a thinner thickness. The primary feature of cold reduction is to reduce the thickness of hot-rolled coils into thinner thicknesses that are not generally attainable in the hot rolled state. The cold reduction operation induces very high strains (work hardening) into the sheet; thus, the sheet not only becomes thinner, but also becomes much harder, less ductile, and very difficult to form. However, after the cold-reduced product is annealed (heated to high temperatures), it becomes very soft and formable. In fact, the combination of cold reduction and annealing lead to a refinement of the steel that provides very desirable and unique forming properties for subsequent use by the customer.