Control Techniques awarded contract by South African steel maker.
Control Techniques SA has recently been awarded a contract by a South African company, Columbus Stainless in Middelburg, Mpumalanga Province. Columbus Stainless is South Africa’s only producer of stainless steel flat products and the Middelburg plant, situated in the ‘Heartland of the Ndebele,’ is a technologically-advanced, fully-integrated, single-site operation that has the flexibility to adjust quickly to market changes. Some of its products are for domestic consumption, while the remainder are exported throughout the world.
The contract was to supply the controls for the new bridle and transport drives at the entry section of one of the annealing and pickling lines. This contract is the largest of a number of projects where Control Techniques drives are replacing older drives and a total of 19 drives have been supplied for the new entry section.
The drive system panel suite was designed, built and commissioned by Control Techniques SA at its drive centre in Kya Sands. The scope of the system is to control 16 wringer roll motors, each 5,5 kW, 4-pole, 525 V geared motors, plus two 110 kW, 525 V bridle motors and a 30 kW exhaust fan. Each of the ringer roll motors is controlled by a 7,5 kW panel mounted Unidrive SP AC drive and the larger bridle motors have 110 kW modular Unidrive SPMD drives with regenerative mode for accuracy of tension control and maximum efficiency saving. Each drive is fitted with additional specialist modules for Profibus communications, as well as a powerful second processor module for distributed control.
Columbus Stainless’ first requirement was for a communications link between the drives and its existing GEM 80 plant PLC. Control Techniques SA worked in conjunction with Converteam in the UK, who was able to provide the HPCi interface PLC between the GEM 80 and the Profibus network for the drives.
Columbus was also pleased with the flexibility of operation of the Unidrive SP AC drives with their parameter selectable multimode operation, the high level of localised programming using the plug-in second processor SM Application module and the ease of drive/processor programming using SyptPro software and the high-speed CT-Net network. Control Techniques provided close engineering support and advice throughout this process, including detailed training of maintenance staff.
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