Automated Control System for Ingot Heating

The system's purpose is to provide automated ingot heating in the soaking pits of roughing mills with a view to reducing power consumption during the roughing mill unstable operation (by means of automatic change for energy-saving process charts), as well as increasing the maintainability of the equipment in the soaking pits division of the roughing mill (by means of eliminating the risk of occurrence and development of unstable and emergency modes of operation).

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:

Control computer based on the Advantech IPC 610 industrial workstation with P-166 processor, 8 MB RAM and 16 MB hard disk, CAN network adapter.
Galvanic isolation modules Advantech ADAM 3014, Grayhill 70G.
Uninterruptibloe power supply APC Smart UPS (700 Vс)
The chief operator's computer Advantech IPS 6806S

Software: The object-oriented software, written in "C++" language, functioning in the operational system DOS-6.22 and Windows 98/2000.

The system is implemented on the roughing mill of Integrated Metallurgical Works "Zaporozhstal" (Zaporozhye, Ukraine). The enhanced version of the system is being developed for the soaking pits division of Blooming Mill-2 of KRSIMMW "Krivorozhstal".

The system can be efficiently used on any heating devices of metallurgical and machine-building works.

The system is implemented at:

Roughing Mill of JSC "Zaporozhstal"