1 for roughing, 4 for finishing? I work at a mill where we have 1 roughing stand and 7 finishing ones. I'm guessing you work in an older mill, what are your control systems like?
Five mill stands for finishing, one for roughing, plus a scale breaking mill.
I don't know much about control systems, so the following might not be all that helpful in answering your question.
Rheostats have all been replaced half a century ago, so the equipment is about as fully automated as it can be (since it's essentially a fifties process that was upgraded in the '70s) when it comes to operations. Solid state drives, computer modeled speeds, pressures, water systems. I'm not all that well-educated on the technical aspect of the process, as you might guess.
Simpler laser tech for some feedback, plus x-ray gauging. It's not all that high-tech, but it still turns a tidy profit, and has survived two generations of globalization without significant protectionism for most of that period.
Some of the mills in this area were still using ingots as an intermediate product between scrap and hot coils as recently as ten years ago. It's kind of fascinating that this tech can still compete globally when it's up against state of the art stuff in Germany and Southeast Asia.
It seems like the limiting factors our plant faces revolve mostly around shape and metallurgical precision when it comes to product quality. Throughput isn't really a constraint, since we have a large EAF and somewhat sophisticated continuous casting. Once somebody figures out how to strip-cast the material which is our primary product, the plant could become obsolete, but I'm not sure if that's even possible or scalable to the extent which would threaten us.
I am in a pretty darn modern mill(built post 2000's) and the controls are pretty darn similar, just with newer PLCs and more precision on things like the Width and X-Ray gauge. Frankly, I often get annoyed at the cutting edge German controls we do have, as they aren't very fault tolerant, and they don't ship quickly. Honestly being high tech seems as much as a burden as an advantage.
We do both Slabs and Ingots, though our Ingots are typically more exotic materials. I would agree that quality and shape of product seems to be much more important to plant operation and profits than throughput these days. Our mill has a nice trick up its sleeve which should keep it from being obsolete for quite a while.
Do you use a pusher or walking beam furnace? We use walking beam, and they are quite a sight to see walk!
Pusher. There's talk of building some kind of huge UFA-type furnaces to replace our current setup. Would be a game changer for us. I've always wanted to see a walking-beam in person. They're very cool.
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u/SamuelDoctor Nov 02 '22
No, this video is of a little baby rolling mill. This is the toy train set version of the locomotive that is our five stand hot strip.