Help you understand more about tinplate steel for Beverage Can
Tinplate steel could be applied in various Metal package.Today we will introduce the tinplate steel for Beverage Can. We will illustrate its’ performance, feature,production process and application area.
1.Tinplate Performance&Feature
The most important feature of tinplate steel is corrosion, easy processing and forming. It could be processed by welding and convenient for installation and printing with non-toxic. Therefore,they are suitable for all kinds of packaging for food, beverage and medicine.
According to the different requirements of packaging industry, there are different needs for the thickness of tinplate, tin coating thickness, mechanical properties which tinplate manufacture must pay high attention to. The characteristics of tinplate steel for beverage can are high purity, non- impurities, more resistant to corrosion. The tinplate width could be draw up to 1200 mm. Modelling of it is very week and size error is small. With Continuous annealing, it owns very good toughness. On the basis of good performance, the thickness of tinplate could be greatly reduced and superior mechanical properties and plasticity could be kept.
There are three classes of tinplate: Grade D, Grade L, Grade MR.
Grade D: Belong to aluminum killed steel. Used for: ultra deep drawing and aging resistance;
Grade L: non-metallic inclusions with low content of residual elements. Used for :high corrosion resistant purposes;
Grade MR: same non-metallic inclusions of steel as Grade L, but no tight limits on residual element content. Used for: the vast majority of food packaging and other bases of tinplate (TMBP)
2. Production Process
Tinplate’s tinning process normally adopts acidic electroplating and hot dipping. The plate’s surface is silvery white after tinning.The thickness of tin is about 0.4 ~ 4 microns. There are a lot of coating porosity after tinning, so the corrosion resistance is bad.Therefore the tinplate must be treated by re-flowing or Chromatic,which can effectively improve the corrosion resistance.
The main production process of tinplate is:
Pickling low carbon steel sheet- Electroplating – Reflowing -Chromatic – Oiling – Inspection – Shear – packaging.
3.Application Area
Tinplate is widely used in food, beverage, oil, chemical industry, paint, aerosol cans, bottle caps, and many other commodities packaging such as all kinds of cans, food cans, beer cap. In China,the high requirements of the tinplate for food, beverage and spray packaging are accounted for about 50% of the current consumption of tinplate.
- Tin main packaging application fields:
- Food cans accounted for 33%
- Beverage Cans accounted for 12%;
- Caps accounted for 7%;
- Aerosol cans accounted for 5%
- Miscellaneous cans accounted for 40%
- The others accounted for 3%.