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Cross Country Bar Mill Control
By Steve Swan & Bernardo Sainzhttp://www.amige.com Página 1
Abstract
This paper describes how Nucor Steel Marion, Inc (former Marion Steel Company) improvedRolling Mill yield and productivity by 20% and 10% with less than one million dollarinvestment in 2004. Three factors increased mill yield: less cobbles due to a better andmore robust master control, less amount of bars lost during product changes due to bettermill setup, and less waste material due to improvement in flying shear cut precision.Productivity improved as a result of increased mill uptime due to less operational andmaintenance delays as well as a secondary effect of yield improvement. The projectincluded several challenges: to integrate a new coordinated control system to improve millavailability with minimum investment and making maximum reuse of a variety of oldequipment and technologies.
Introduction
Nucor Steel Marion, Inc. is a division of Nucor Steel meaning that they share the samebusiness philosophy, which focuses on taking care of customers by being the safest, highestquality, lowest cost, most productive and profitable steel company in the North America.Nucor Marion manufactures a full line of specialty steel products in the specific shapesneeded for the highway, construction and agricultural industries. The company alsospecializes in rebar, merchant rounds, breakaway Uchannel, small and midrange signposts,delineators and cable barrier systems.In order to serve the concrete construction industry, Nucor Marion manufactures reinforcingbar. The breakaway Uchannel systems for small and midsized highway signs exceed crashimpact standards by over 200% and they utilize newbillet steel that has 25% greater tensilestrength and costs up to 50% less.Combining these features and the current quality standards of a plant like this, there wereseveral variables that were faced in order to provide the best control system from thefurnace automation and billet tracking through the complete revamping of the mastercontrol of the rolling mill and cooling bed.
Scope of the Project
According to the standards of the company, their system was required to meet thefunctional control requirements through the integration of coordinated drives and controlsystem. Overall performance requirements are based on the user’s business needs as theyrelate to production, quality, reporting and system availability.Marion Steel and AMIGE worked closely to define and agree on the systems that should beupgraded in order to maximize the costbenefit relation. The extensive knowledge of theprocess variables and best rolling practices by Marion Steel personnel were enhanced withstate of the art control equipment and algorithms integrated in the very robust and openarchitecture of the system provided by AMIGE.The basic system philosophy met the following requirements:
 
Cross Country Bar Mill Control
By Steve Swan & Bernardo Sainzhttp://www.amige.com Página 2
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Enhance performance and reduce communication latency by customized structuringof the functional control to the mill configuration, including placing the functionalcontrol as close to the process and process sensors as practical.•
 
Structure hardware and software so that each can be independently tested.•
 
Minimize startup time by incorporating component simulation software into highlyeffective factory and field system simulations.•
 
Extensive use of structured control blocks with friendly configuration tools.•
 
Controller intelligence to directly generate diagnostics rather than requiringprogrammers to write dedicated software code.•
 
Encourage production and engineering personnel to diagnose problems by extensiveuse of structured diagnostic messages available throughout the system.•
 
Communicate process knowledge contained in the system directly to the operatorswith an intelligent combination of easily selectable graphical and alphanumericscreens.•
 
Make available operating information, which allows user development of plannedmaintenance schedules and problem anticipation.•
 
Minimize the quantity and type of dedicated communication networks and protocol.•
 
Increased system reliability by implementing a flexible drive system that can beapplied to a variety of applications.
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