Pressductor at 70: Still a force to be reckoned with

When a reader appreciates the flawless cover of a book or magazine, they scarcely spend a moment wondering about the remarkable technology that makes its beautiful appearance possible. It’s essential that the shiny steel plates at the printing press are completely flat, without any curvature, warping or other surface imperfections. Anything other than a true, level surface will result in uneven pressure between plate and printed page that’s all too visible in the quality of the finished publication. 

Ensuring the mirror-like finish of those printing plates – and the uniformity of a thousand other products across a vast range of industries – depends on extremely precise measurement and control of the rolling force at the mill, where steel is successively squeezed through a series of cold rolling passes to achieve the desired thinness and evenness. 

Until the middle of the last century, this was achieved with the aid of mechanical strain gauge load cells that were used to measure rolling forces in metals production and other heavy industrial processes. Extremes of temperature, physical shocks, vibration and electromagnetic interference are the norm in these harsh environments, compromising the accuracy and reliability of conventional strain gauges that demand frequent recalibration and costly maintenance. 

Over the subsequent seven decades, Pressductor has become the metals industry’s de facto roll force measurement solution as the technology has been steadily refined. To date ABB has delivered over 20,000 roll force load cells to mills worldwide. The same core transducer technology has also found wider use in the metals production industry, notably in ABB’s strip tension measurement systems for cold strip mills and processing lines.

Printing presses and paper mills aside, ABB force measurement technologies are hidden heroes in the production of a vast range of products we encounter or use on a daily basis. 

Accurate measurement of steel or aluminium sheet and strip flatness has allowed vehicles to become lighter and more fuel-efficient, achieving more accurate tolerances in production with less material wasted. Maintaining cold rolled metal strip flatness is also a key part of white goods production, from refrigerators and freezers to stoves and microwave ovens. Indoors and outside, cold rolled sheet metal features in hundreds of other guises. Building facades, roofs, draining boards, coins, venetian blinds, cylinder head gaskets, hearing aids, cables, heat exchangers, coolers, solar panels and superconductors are just a few of the products where Pressductor technology makes flawless products possible. 

And that’s far from the end of the story. To remain competitive, rolling mills are under commercial and regulatory pressure to modernize their operations in order to comply with increasingly stringent environmental requirements. Accurate force measurement and flatness control helps to reduce waste, with less needed to rework materials and a consequent reduction in the electrical energy used in production. 

Seventy years on, Dr Dahle’s extraordinary invention plays a continuing role in making the manufacture of countless products we take for granted more efficient, reliable, cost-effective and sustainable.  

Here’s to the next seven decades of ABB innovation in force measurement.