GE Fanuc control at Dutch steel plant

In the Ijmuiden plant of the Corus Group the hot-rolled steel coils transport system has its drive and control concept from GE Industrial Systems and the automation technology from GE Fanuc

In the Ijmuiden plant of the Corus Group, a merger between Koninklijke Hoogovens NV and British Steel plc, hot-rolled steel coils are transported using a fully automated system.

The entire electrical engineering and automation system for a major part of the plant was provided and commissioned by General Electric, with the drive and control concept coming from GE Industrial Systems and the automation technology from GE Fanuc.

The coil handling system in the Dutch steel site Ijmuiden is a major part of this sophisticated new plant, a so-called Direct Sheet Plant (DSP).

More specifically, it is a combined thin-slab casting plant with an associated hot-coil mill train and the coils produced are supplied to processing industries such as automotive or shipbuilding.

The coil transportation system is used to convey the coils coming from the hot-rolling mill, the minimum cycle time being 90 seconds.

The hot coils, weighing up to 33 metric tons, are first conveyed to a thermal treatment plant and then to the shipment station.

A walking beam conveying system, consisting of several segments, and an automatic crane system used for charging the water cooling basin are combined into a single integrated system.

Both the walking beam transportation and charging/discharging operations are carried out automatically, with no operator action required.

A storage management system (LVS, Level2) is used for integrated data management.

This system manages all production orders from the roll train and generates the corresponding transportation and cooling orders.

In addition, it allows operators to view the walking beam status as well as storage positions in the water basin.

All LVS-generated transport orders are passed to the corresponding controllers which in turn use this information to control the motion of the walking beam segments, the charging/ discharging functions as well as the operating cycles of the sub-aggregates.

To achieve the required 99% system availability, a working material flow tracking system is an absolute must.

To this end, the entire coil data specification, including all parameters, is also stored in the PLC, thus ensuring full data security, even in case of failures affecting the LVS or the communication between LVS and PLC.

When normal operation is resumed, data consistency between PLC and LVS is automatically restored.

The control concept developed by GE Industrial Systems GmbH is based on GE Fanuc's Series 90T-30 and Series 90T-70 PLCs, plus their Field Control distributed I/O and control system as well as various Datapanel graphical operator interfaces.

The central co-ordination is carried out by a Series 90-70 PLC.

It performs the tasks of a data concentrator and communication with the framing LVS and the Level2 computer of the mill train.

As several protocols are used on the plant's Ethernet system, a compact industrial VME computer module was integrated into the PLC controller for data conversion, allowing full advantage to be taken of the VME bus interfacing capability of the Series 90-70.

Communication between the PLC and the distributed I/O is carried out via GE Fanuc's GENIUS field bus, while the controlled drive units integrated in the coil system (type GE AV300I) are controlled via PROFIBUS.

The various measuring and sub-systems (such as strapping machines, marking robots, and weighing systems) are equipped with micro-controllers from various manufacturers in order to implement the overall control functions via PROFIBUS.

The co-ordinating PLC provides the corresponding control and data records to each of these subsystems and monitors them at the same time.

A further Series 90-30 controller is connected to the main PLC via Ethernet.

This PLC controls the complex hydraulic aggregates and also monitors and tests this subsystem.

In addition, various Datapanels connected to the PLCs provide local access to data and alarm messages.

There were two good reasons for choosing GE Fanuc automation products.

First of all, they provided impressively open communication capability with third-party devices.

This ensured maximum flexibility in designing the overall control concepts and made subsequent changes to meet new requirements much easier to handle.

The second reason for choosing GE Fanuc components was their proven reliability and performance based on the customer's experience in a large number of Hoogovens (Corus) plants as well as in the associated mill train and thin-slab casting plant.

The automatic coil handling system has been in operation since April 2000.

The experience and results so far are excellent.

As a result of this general satisfaction the customer is now considering expanding the system using GE Fanuc's CIMPLICITY HMI control and monitoring software for extended operator support with full plant-wide overview and error messaging capabilities.

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