Yokogawa’s Centum VP R6 upgrade at ArcelorMittal South Africa
December 2018System Integration & Control Systems Design
ArcelorMittal South Africa’s Vanderbijlpark facility is one of the world’s largest inland steel works. Cold Annealing Plant Nr.2 (CAPL#2), has been running on a Yokogawa COPSV CFCD distributed control system for more than three decades. Although the DCS has proven extremely reliable, every system has a limited life span. Recently, Yokogawa and ArcelorMittal South Africa worked together to upgrade the DCS to the latest Yokogawa technology, Centum VP Release Version 6.
It was while ArcelorMittal South Africa was in the process of preparing for the migration that Yokogawa was informed of the COPSV CFCD control system failure. Yokogawa quickly responded to the call for urgent support and investigated. A decision was made to proceed with the upgrade in order to get ArcelorMittal South Africa’s system operational again as quickly as possible and resume production. At very short notice, Yokogawa was tasked with ensuring that the plant became operational in seven days. Fortunately, some of the hardware equipment had already been sourced and re-writing of the database software had already been completed.
Co-innovation was key to success
The first step was to assess the current status of the system, and determine the outstanding hardware, software and engineering required to ensure successful upgrade completion. The remainder of the equipment and software was ordered while the database software was tested together with the new hardware and then expedited in order to get the plant up and running.
Through a process of co-innovation, Yokogawa and ArcelorMittal South Africa worked alongside each other to create new value. This is in line with Yokogawa’s new brand slogan of ‘Co-innovating tomorrow’. Yokogawa’s service team rescheduled other work and extended working hours to spend a weekend of engineering, installation, testing and commissioning at the customer site.
The plant was successfully migrated, tested, commissioned and ready for operation within the timeframe specified by the customer, with quoted hours to spare. The new Centum VP Release Version 6 controls the plant’s complete instrumentation setup to the process. All instrumentation parameters are continuously controlled and monitored via data communication to and from the plant process computers. Yokogawa was proud to deliver a DCS to ArcelorMittal South Africa which is compatible with the latest technology and Windows 10 operating systems.
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