Automated System of Control over the Heating Modes of Soaking Pits

The system’s purpose is to ensure automated control over the process of ingots heating in the soaking pits of roughing mills, as well as to provide the operational and technological staff with proper information.

The system ensures:

a more efficient control over the ingots heating process as a result of providing the operative staff with full on-line information regarding the process and the soaking pit operation results;
improvement of metal rolling conditions due to reduction of the ingots temperature deviation from the specified value at the exit from the pit;
reduction of the fuel rate and metal waste for scale due to the correction of the temperature conditions depending on the rolling speed;
improvement of the technical level of production and of the conditions of work due to convenient data access and process control, as well as the system hardware diagnostics;
efficient claims analysis and creation of a base for the purposed improvement of the rolled stock quality.

The system’s functions are:

to collect data regarding the state of process variables of each soaking pit in the group from primary control instrumentation;
to control the actuators in order to keep the process variables within the specified limits;
to control the ingots heating process in the automatic mode according to the specified initial heat variables;
to display the trends of the main process variables;
to record and store process data and events;
to transfer the data to the chief operator’s workstation to create backup copies of the process reports;
to enter the data regarding the heats and transfer them to the workstations of the lower level during automated ingots heating;
to display current values of the process variables of each soaking pit in the group on the chief operator’s workstation monitor;
to transfer the data to the special data base on the automated control system server for storage and processing;
to process and print out the reports regarding the ingots heating process;
to update the process data base with standard heating schedules.

Hardware:

the operator’s computer based on the Advantech PC-6608BP-30Z industrial workstation, with P3 Tualatin 1,26GHz processor, 1,0 GB RAM and RAID-array with two hard disks, 80 GB each, ControlNet-Redundant adapter;
two Allen Bradley programmable logic controllers (PLC) of FlexLogix series with input/output modules;
uninterruptible power supply APC Smart UPS RT 2000 ВА;
the chief operator’s computer Advantech IPC-6608BP-30Z, with Pentium-IV 3,2 GHz processor, 1,0 GB RAM and RAID-array with two hard disks, 400 GB each, ControlNet-Redundant adapter.

Software: Environment for the PLC programming – RSLogix-5000, RSLinx, SCADA Genesis and OS Windows XP

The system's working documentation was sent to the roughing mill of JSC «Krivorozhstal» (Ukraine, Krivoy Rog).

The system can be efficiently used to develop similar control systems for any heating devices at metallurgical and machine-building plants.