The customer
As one of China’s most competitive steel producers, the continuous annealing line was an extremely important project of their 'Tenth-Five Year Plan'. The aim with this processing line Baosteel was to have China’s most competitive production facility for packaging materials featuring an extremely thin product specification, high annealing temperature, fast processing speed and high level of automation for optimal production of tin and chromium strips, as well as thin gauge CQ cold-rolled sheets.
ABB solution
ABB supplied electrical and automation systems and carried out plant design, project management, training, erection and commissioning. The scope included low voltage drives, ACS800 motors, elongation and flattening control, tensionmeter weld seam detector, System 800xA Level 1 automation including AC800PEC controllers, operations control desks and boxes, I/O panels and emergency stop system. Level 2 manufacturing with standby server configuration, complete processing line control and Oracle database management system were also include in the ABB delivery.
The complete offering from ABB includes automation control system, variable speed AC motors and drives, Stressometer® Flatness System for SPM enabling accurate control of the annealing process and the production of high-quality products. All electrical and automation activities are brought under a common control platform to provide for energy efficiency and maximize productivity.
The core technology of the ABB multi-drive is DTC - Direct Torque Control, proven in various applications and demanding environments, and consistently providing top performance that ensures the drives do not place any limits on the process. This is one base of the accurate small tension control in the furnace section.
ABB System 800xA integrated automation delivers a single operation, engineering, and information management environment for an extended automation scope as well as wide security features supporting regulatory compliance and ensuring safe, reliable operations. Object/aspect characteristic can integrate operation and control, and manage information seamlessly to allow for multi-tasking, configuration flexibility, and all types of information searches and statistics.
ABB's AC 800PEC controllers are standard metallurgical treatment solutions used in a unified treatment of high-end PLC controller, the cycle can be achieved the fastest processing time of 25 microseconds, and supports very fast analog/digital conversion and nominal/actual value comparison directly on peripheral I/O module. The well-established ABB tension meter and flatness system, Stressometer® 7.0 FSA, is used for high quality measurement in skin pass mill to achieve precise metal strip flatness.
What was achieved?
On Sep.11, 2007, the first qualified coil was completed under the management of ABB Metals within only three months on site commissioning. Based on high availability of ABB's equipment, the stable tension and speed control, on May.30, 2008, 9 months after completion, this continuous processing line ensured the achievement of a high product quality, high yields, low energy consumption, low operating costs and minimum down-time. The speed of process section reaches at 800m/min, which made it the world’s fastest line of its kind at the time. And with the thickness of 0.15mm, it also set a new record as the world’s thinnest processing line. The facility now produces 420,000 tons of CQ, T2.5, T3, T4, T5, IF T2.5 material steel grades annually with a width of 700-1080mm and thickness of 0.15-0.5mm. Entry and exit speed is 1000m/min.