Development in Control Systems for Hot Steel Rolling Mills

By Raymond George Brister, Technical Expert from Control Techniques Asia-Pacific

Introduction Control Techniques of Newtown, Powys, UK, is a world leader in the design, production and marketing of electronic drives modules for ac and dc electric motors. These products provide accurate speed and / or torque control of electric motors and have applications in almost every industrial process. Our drives are fitted to a vast range of machinery in the various industries such as paper, printing, textiles, plastics, pumps and fans, material handling, wire and cable production. Complete system design and manufacture is carried out locally within the network of Control Techniques Drive Centres. There are currently XX Drive Centres around the world, which provide customers with immediate access to a wealth of applns engineering experience, comprehensive systems build facilities, spares back up with rapid supply, plus maintenance and a full service back up organisation. Control Techniques Asia Pacific, a company based in Singapore, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Control Techniques Ltd. There are X Drive Centres in the Asia Pacific region. These are located in Singapore, Australia (Sydney and Melbourne), India (XXX) Indonesia (XXX), Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Thailand (Bangkok) and Vietnam (Ho Chih Minh).

Previous Hot Mill Control System A typical layout of a previous Hot Mill drive, designed and installed by CTAP is shown below: The mill motors were controlled by Control Techniques Mentor 1 modules. These proven, versatile and highly reliable controllers have been used extensively world wide with over 1000 drives installed by Control Techniques Thailand alone. Localised control boxes enabled the operator to Run / Jog Reverse / Stop the stands and to lock off the power if work needed to be done on the stands themselves. The mill could not be started from the main pulpit but the Cascaded Speed Control was carried out from there. The menus for the range of products intended to be rolled were stored in a PC located in the main pulpit. When a particular product was selected for rolling, the information concerning the cross sectional area of the billet and the mean roll diameter of each stand was downloaded to a PC.

The control system was based on the principle of constant volume rolling and cascaded speed control whereby the speed of each stand is related to the Master Finishing stand according to the expression A1xN1xD1xk1 = A2xN2xD2xk2 = A3xN3xD3xk3 etc Where A = Cross sectional area of the bar N = Roll speed in rps D = Mean roll diameter K = scale constant for each stand taking in gear ration between motor and roll stand and cascaded trim potentiometer. Calculations concerning the motor speed reference for each drive were carried out continuously in the PLC and transmitted simultaneously to the second processor in the Control Techniques Mentor drives in the form of 12-bit parallel words. Thus all stand speeds are simultaneously updated, thereby avoiding tension / compression during speed changes. If the speed of a section was adjusted using the desk mounted Cascaded Speed Trim potentiometers, the PLC calculated the new speed of all upstream drives and simultaneously updated them. Individual speed trims for the drives (catering for errors in initial calibration ) were available to the operators from wall mounted stations mounted near the Mill stands. The speed of the master stand was set by the operator using a preset potentiometer. This system, whilst successful, offering nothing for on line monitoring other than conventional analogue Ammeters and Speed Indicators on the desks. Current Hot Mill Control Systems After the successful installation of a Hot Mill using the above control system, CT Asia Pacific has steadily progressed, over the past five years, to a screen driven system utilising a SCADA package based on software produced by Citect Technology Ltd of Sydney, Australia. This system was initially installed in a Rolling Mill in Sydney in 1993 and has been further refined for use on later Mills. The current arrangement of the controls is shown below. This control system differs significantly from the earlier one. The PC is a much more powerful machine 486 DX2 100 and the complete mill is controlled from multiple Window based screens using a SCADA package designed and developed by CTAP. Also, the addition of a more powerful, 32 bit processor card, MD29, which plugs into the Mentor II enables us to undertake many tasks in the drive which were previously the domain of the PLC.

Consequently, our current control strategy is to use the PC for Product menu storage and On line monitoring, the MD29 for closed loop functions such as bar speed control, loop height control etc and the PLC for sequence control. This enables us to use a significantly simpler and cheaper PLC which uses ladder logic and is therefore more user friendly for the site engineer. Communication between the Control Desk and the Control Panel is via a remote PLC I/O rack and a data highway. Communication between the PC and the drives uses multiple RS485 serial comms providing simultaneous signals to all the drives.