Recently, Yuefeng has broken through the limitations of traditional hot rolling processes and successfully developed short-process cast-rolled thin billets for high-depth punching aluminum sheet and strip - a food-grade bottle cap special material. This enables domestic high-quality aluminum products to enter the lives of the general public and serve daily life needs.
The small aluminum bottle caps may seem ordinary, but the requirements for the quality of the raw materials are extremely strict. These materials, which are used for sealing beverage, wine, medicine, and cosmetic bottles, have a thickness of only 0.20 - 0.35 millimeters. They must possess high strength, good ductility, and high flatness, be able to be easily formed, withstand high-temperature sterilization, and be easy to open. For a long time, the specialized materials for high-end bottle caps in China have mostly relied on the long-process hot rolling process for production. This not only has high energy consumption and costs, but also the key core technologies have long been subject to foreign control.
"As long as there is market demand, we must tackle the 'difficult issues'!" The Yufeng technical team focused on the advantages of the short-process casting and rolling process and initiated the research and development project for high-depth cold-rolled aluminum sheet and strip. Compared to the traditional hot rolling process, the short-process casting and rolling does not require secondary melting of aluminum liquid, which can not only reduce energy consumption and lower pollution, but also significantly reduce production costs. However, this process also has obvious "weak points" - the produced billets are prone to problems such as coarse crystallization and rough surfaces, and their deep drawing performance is much worse than that of hot-rolled products, and they cannot meet the requirements of high-end bottle caps.
To overcome the performance challenges, the R&D team focused their efforts on the main line of "component design - organization regulation - process optimization - surface control", aiming to solve the two core problems of "high production ear rate" and "insufficient surface smoothness" of the product. In simple terms, the production ear rate refers to the "small protrusions" that appear at the edges after the bottle cap is punched, which must be controlled within 3% otherwise the bottle cap will be crooked and unusable; while the surface smoothness directly determines the appearance level and printing effect of the bottle cap, and cannot tolerate any flaws.
After numerous trials and refinements, Yuefeng finally overcame the technical bottleneck. They not only controlled the product's production rate within the standard range, but also met the customer's high-end stamping requirements in terms of yield strength, tensile strength, elongation rate, etc. Currently, a mature and stable industrial production system has been established, enabling batch production and stable supply. With its excellent quality, it has won high recognition from downstream customers.
It is worth noting that this bottle cap material is produced throughout a green and short-process production line, reducing energy consumption and smoke emissions caused by secondary melting. This complies with the national strategies of energy conservation and emission reduction as well as manufacturing upgrading. Compared with plastic bottle caps, aluminum bottle cap material has a lower cost and can be 100% recycled, making it a green new choice in the field of food and drug packaging.
