Abstract

Ultra high-strength steels are becoming more common in the steel industry. The mechanical cutting of these steels with guillotine cutters is desirable when compared to plasma or laser cutters, but it is not clear how much more stress these ultra high-strength steels can cause to the guillotine cutter. The purpose of this paper is to analyse thousands of cutting events of steels of varying yield strength and thickness from a guillotine cutter and plot informative norms from these events. These norms are generalised l_p norms of displacement and its fourth derivative, snap. According to the findings, at least for moderately thin (5–10mm) ultra highstrength steels (yield strengths 900–1100MPa) the stress on the cutter is not much higher than for softer conventional thin steels. Slower operating speed has also reduced stress levels considerably when cutting ultra high-strength steels with yield strengths up to 1330MPa. The acceleration measurements are from SSAB Europe Oy in Finland.