The global metals industry in recent times has been subject to influences beyond its control. Accommodating China's insatiable appetite for both raw materials and finished products has made a huge strain on the supply and demand of industrial metals and inflicted the metals industry with rises in raw material and energy costs as well as a reduction in raw material supply. This has led to ever-decreasing operating margins, resulting in companies raising prices to customers in an attempt to cover escalating costs. In addition, the oil price, currently at a record high, may have a long term impact on the metals industry. As the oil price soars, London's Metal Exchange's base metals index has slumped 10% since reaching a record high a few months ago.
Across the world - from Asia to South America - Citect has been helping its iron and steel industry customers reduce costs and improve production through its Citectscada and Ampla, MES solutions, as well as offering business process evaluation, engineering design, and technology implementation services through its Professional Services division.
Steel plants are usually very large, with equipment spread out over several areas - making a scada system with distributed architecture essential. Citectscada's fully redundant, distributed architecture recently helped a large steel manufacturer in South Korea to reduce operator and maintenance costs by 30% per year. This manufacturer required a control system that could provide realtime data processing with a user-friendly configuration.
Like most steel plants, it needed a scada system that could handle an enormous quantity of data and I/O points. Citectscada, operating one of the world's largest PC-based scada systems with over 450 000 I/O points, fit the bill. Steel plants operate on high-speed networks and operators must see display data changes almost instantaneously or they lose confidence in the system. Citectscada is able to display data in realtime, even on the largest systems, boosting operator confidence in the system. Citectscada's built-in redundancy and client/server architecture mean that data is safe and can quickly be updated across the system.
Alarms and trending are also very important for the steel industry. BlueScope Steel in Australia needed a reliable, user-friendly scada system that would allow operators to quickly and easily identify plant status. Furthermore, they wanted to be able to identify trends that could prevent future disturbances. Citectscada's Process Analyst displays both trend and alarm data in one integrated screen, enabling operators to more easily determine the cause of process disturbances and remedy them before they affect production.
Using Citectscada, the BlueScope's operators, engineers and managers can visualise realtime trend comparisons from different time frames. This means the characteristics of the distribution network can be better understood, which leads to design improvements and reduced maintenance, stoppages and downtime. For the BlueScope project, the display of trends down to millisecond resolution juxtaposed with the display of alarms/events enables very fine analysis of the sequence of events. BlueScope can therefore quickly locate the cause of stoppages, the fault can be identified and the plant can continue running with minimum disruption.
South America
Citect's MES solution, Ampla, has also recently been implemented at a leading South American steel plant. Ampla has been very successful in manufacturing plants and mining sites in reducing downtime. Industries experiencing skyrocketing demand, such as coal and steel, are faced with the need to build new plants or increase overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) to meet market demand. Building new plants can be very expensive without offering increased production capacity for months or years. Therefore, Ampla is an important tool to help managers increase production without significant capital expenditures. In certain cases, Ampla has achieved ROI in a matter of weeks by reducing or even eliminating downtime.
Another aspect of meeting surging market demand is to bring in consulting services to identify areas of improvement and suggest technologies to increase efficiency.
OneSteel has felt the pressure of increasing raw materials costs and chose Citect Professional Services to conduct a Discovery Services Study that provides business consulting, engineering design, business process evaluation and technology implementation services. At its Sydney steel mill site, OneSteel is using Citectscada to monitor process performance and uncover underperforming areas in order to take quick corrective measures. With the assistance of Citect's Professional Services, the company is using its Citectscada system to measure raw material usage as well as OEE. This has provided managers visibility to see where operating costs can be reduced and process efficiencies augmented.
According to BlueScope Senior Electrical Engineer Claudio Lima, operators are now better able to monitor processes and Citect's powerful trending and alarms capability warn operators of potential process deviations, allowing them to remedy problems before they impact production.
Whether implementing an advanced scada system, using the latest MES technology to reduce downtime or using consulting services to identify problem areas, steel mills have many possibilities for increasing production and reducing downtime without investing millions in new equipment.
For more information contact Niconette du Toit, Citect, 011 699 6600, [email protected], www.citect.com
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