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Continuous monitoring and display of mill forces

A Vishay Nobel product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Apr 1, 2005

Vishay Intertechnology has announced the availability of the Vishay Nobel RFS 3 system.

Vishay Intertechnology has announced the availability of the Vishay Nobel RFS 3 system.

The RFS 3 system provides mill operators with continuous monitoring and display of roll separating force and differential balance forces.

In addition, it provides local and remote indications of "metal in mill" and "mill overload", said the company.

Signal outputs representing the rolling mill forces on each side of the mill that are being measured by the system are supplied for the operation of remote indicators, or for use by external control systems.

The RFS 3 system is designed to retrofit on to existing rolling mills that have no load measurement facilities, and where the fitting of load cells is either impossible or prohibitively expensive.

It uses the principle of extensometers fixed to the mill stand, where the sides of the mill stand become the load cells, said Vishay.

The system utilises four Vishay Nobel AST 3P high-performance signal transmitters and either two or four Vishay BLH Type E-4 semiconductor extensometers.

The four AST 3P units communicate using Modbus RTU protocol, via the master unit, to pass force and status details to all units.

Each unit thus has all the force values to enable it to show the four computed values: "work side", "drive side", "sum", and "difference".

Each one can be configured to output via its analogue port for either 0V to 10V, 4mA to 20mA, or 0mA to 20mA to represent any of the computed values.

Trip levels can also be configured to energise relays at pre-set values and referenced to any of these four computed values, said Vishay.

There is also built-in redundancy, so that if a transducer is damaged or has an incorrect output, its value is ignored, an error light and signal is generated and the complimentary transmitter doubles its output to make up for the missing one.

Three front-panel LED indicators show the system communications status, the metal in mill level status, and the overload status.

A toggle switch selects, in conjunction with the remote zero track switch, the zero track mode.

The local and remote switches work in parallel to inhibit the zero track function, so if the remote switch is on, the local switch has no effect, and vice versa.

A momentary switch enables the operator to zero the inputs.

The two or four Model E4 extensometers are connected via either one or two junction boxes to the RFS 3 unit.

Special high-temperature cable is used to wire the extensometers to the junction box, while stainless-steel-braid armored cable is used from the junction box to the unit.

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