Development of Marking Technology for Hot Steel Billet

Recently, remarkable progress of distribution technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), has been made in addition to conventional barcode, two-dimensional array code and electromagnetic card. These technologies play an important role to recognize individually and to improve the trace-ability. In the steel manufacturing process, those technologies are also extremely important. Numerous attempts have been made in the industry to improve the accuracy and make the system automated in the last several decades. Some types of automatic marking presses and paint markers were examined together with character recognize technology at Daido Steel. The purpose of this report is to give an outline of the developments of the system, before 1999, and arrange the technical tasks.