Wire drawing machines
Beyond speed and throughput: the new rules of wire production
An interview with Carlos Bittner, DRUIDS Process Technology
Wire producers are changing the way they evaluate new equipment. Productivity remains essential, but speed alone is no longer enough. Energy consumption, labor, process stability, safety, environmental impact, digital supervision and the real cost per tonne are increasingly part of the same investment decision.
We spoke with Carlos Bittner of DRUIDS Process Technology about what this means for machinery manufacturers and why the complete production process is becoming more important than the performance of an isolated machine.
What are wire producers asking for today when they evaluate new machinery?
They are looking much more at the complete picture.
Capacity, speed, and product quality remain fundamental, but the discussion quickly moves to energy consumption, labor, maintenance, process stability, environmental impact and, ultimately, the real cost per tonne of finished wire.
This changes the engineering approach. It’s no longer enough to optimize one machine. You have to understand how each production stage affects the next one.
Is this why DRUIDS is focusing on complete process concepts?
Exactly. DRUIDS is uniquely positioned as the only global supplier able to provide the complete chain, from wire drawing through thermal processing and coating to final packaging, from a single engineering source.
With DRU-VECTOR we cover wire drawing, with DRU-GAL fast annealing and hot-dip galvanizing, and with DRU-PAK the final handling and packaging of the finished wire.
These are very different machines, but they follow the same engineering philosophy: higher productivity with lower operating cost, lower energy consumption, less manual intervention and better process control.
The real advantage is that the complete process can be considered as one system rather than as a collection of independent machines.
Why does that integration matter so much?
Because problems rarely remain inside one machine.
Drawing is a good example. Surface condition, residual lubricant, and friction during drawing directly affect energy consumption, machine availability, and downstream annealing and galvanizing quality.
The same applies later in the process. A well-controlled annealing cycle affects coating behaviour, and poor handling or packaging at the end of the line can compromise the quality achieved upstream.
The complete production chain is interconnected. If you optimize each stage separately without understanding those interactions, you are missing part of the opportunity.
DRU-GAL is probably your best-known technology. What’s different about its process concept?
DRU-GAL was developed from the beginning as an integrated annealing and galvanizing process rather than as a sequence of conventional process stages.
It combines fast electric annealing and hot-dip galvanizing in one line. The process does not require hydrochloric acid pickling or flux before the zinc bath, eliminating strong acids and several hazardous chemical stages normally associated with galvanizing.
But eliminating acids is only one part of the concept.
Annealing temperature, cooling, zinc bath conditions and coating are managed as one integrated process. The line is highly digitalised and recipe-driven, which reduces dependence on individual operator experience and gives very high repeatability between production runs.
How do sustainability and energy efficiency fit into this?
For industrial customers, sustainability must make economic sense.
If a process uses less energy, eliminates hazardous chemicals, reduces zinc consumption, lowers maintenance, improves working conditions, and produces more stable quality, sustainability becomes part of competitiveness rather than a separate environmental argument.
Energy efficiency is also much broader than installing a more efficient motor. Sometimes the biggest saving comes from redesigning the process so that an entire production stage is no longer necessary.
That is the principle behind DRU-GAL. It is fully electric, locally emission-free and designed to minimize the number of process stages required to produce annealed and galvanized wire.
The carbon footprint of the final product is also becoming commercially relevant, particularly for producers supplying markets with increasingly demanding environmental regulations.
Automation and skilled labor are also major concerns. How are they changing machinery design?
The goal is not simply to reduce labor. It is to reduce unnecessary manual operations and dependence on subjective decisions.
You cannot design a modern line assuming that every shift will have an operator with twenty years of process experience.
Knowledge increasingly has to be incorporated into the equipment itself through recipes, automatic control loops, diagnostics, guided procedures and digital supervision.
This also applies to the end of the line. A highly automated drawing or galvanizing process loses part of its advantage if coil handling and packaging remain largely manual. That is why we developed the DRU-PAK family.
And beyond automation, production managers need useful information. Our DRU-Doctor-Monitor system is designed to show where losses occur, how operating conditions change and what is really affecting productivity and cost per tonne.
There is a major difference between collecting data and providing information that helps people make decisions.
Where do you see wire production technology heading over the coming years?
Towards much more integrated production concepts.
I do not think the future will be defined by one machine being slightly faster than another. The competitive difference will increasingly come from how efficiently the complete production chain operates, from drawing through processing to packaging.
Wire producers need to produce consistently with less energy, fewer hazardous process steps, less manual intervention and better process information.
That is where we see the future of wire production, and that is where DRUIDS is concentrating its development.
We would like to thank Carlos Bittner for sharing his insights into the world of wire drawing, and we invite our readers to follow DRUIDS Process Technology’s online stand on Expometals to stay up to date with the company’s latest developments.
