Empty Aerosol Tin Can High Speed Precision Engineering
Tin plated steel arrives in coils from the steelworks. Each one is about 4km long and a metre wide.
A colour printing press prints the can graphics directly onto the steel sheet before the sheet is slit and chopped to smaller sheets for bending into the can cylinders.
Welding the seam
The aerosol can welding process. Two copper electrodes roll alond the seen. A large electric current passes between the elctrodes and melts the two peices of steel together.
Welding the sheet edges together using electric current. Two electrodes press against the steel, one from outside and one from inside. The electrodes are connected to a power supply that drives a huge current of up to 5000 Amps through the metal. This melts the two overlapping layers together. This is called resistive welding. The current is pulsed at high frequency, one pulse for each spot or 'nugget' on the weld. To make a long seam the electrodes need to be wheels to roll along the can.
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Making the perfect electrode wheel
For a perfect leak-proof welded seam the electrode wheels must also be perfect. After only one turn a copper wheel would pick up blobs of molten metal and be useless. The solution is to run copper wire round the wheels that is never re-used. The copper is recycled and made into new wire so the cost is reduced.
The copper wire always presents perfect new electrode surfaces as it is only used once. Getting the inner wheel into the inside of the can is not so easy as the can is moving in one direction. The trick is to curl the can into a cylinder just before it gets to the wheels.
There is a "nugget" for each pulse of current. The nuggets must just overlap. The slightest gap would cause a leak. Engineers regularly inspect the welds with a microscope.
A aerosol tin can approaches the wheels from the left. It has just been curved around the inner wire.
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Hiding the seam
The seam on aerosol tin cans is a problem for can designers. The aerosol can is printed when it is flat sheet and then bent and welded. As ink is an insulator it must not cover the seam because it will stop the welding current from flowing though the tinplate sheet metal. This leaves an unprintable stripe on the can.
Engineers have managed to reduce the width of the stripe from 5mm to 1.5mm. Now that you have seen how the seam is made you can see that this is a big precision engineering achievement.
The final process is to add the aerosol can top (cone) and bottom (dome)