1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to rolling mills in which bars of a predetermined length are gathered into bundles, and is concerned in particular with a system and method for separating and recovering unacceptably short bars in advance of the bundling operation.
2. Description of the Prior Art
During the process of rolling bars in a bar mill, merchant mill, or section mill, short bars are invariably produced in the course of producing full length bars (known as commercial order lengths). The bar products can be ribbed reinforcing bars, plain rounds, squares, hexagonals, flats, angles, channels or even in some cases special shapes. Mill operators employ various methods to separate the short bars from the full length bars. These include optimization of billet length, optimization of rolled product length, cropping/chopping off of the short length arisings at mill shears or at the cold shear after the cooling bed. Each of these methods results in some form of cost added to end product.
The principal objective of the present invention is to provide a system and method for minimizing such added costs by separating and recovering short bars in a manner that improves upon the yield of the mill without adversely affecting the mill's throughput.