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Case Studies

New casting plant gets fully automated through PROFIBUS technology

ID,


Project
The steel producer Dillinger Group (located in Dillingen, Germany) is well known for its extremely high product quality in the category of heavy steel plates. The starting material for that (slab caster) is produced locally in the Dillingen iron- and steel plant, where a new vertical continuous casting plant has been built recently. A key objective of this project was to completely automate this new plant and the entire casting process from the very beginning to enable best product quality at high cost efficiency.

Solution
PROFIBUS was selected as communication technology. The control system (ABB) comprised twenty redundant controller distributed to 110 cabinets and 75 operator locations. More than 500 field devices (pressure, flow, temperature) from different vendors and 40 control valves have been installed and communicate via 38 PROFIBUS lines. The installation included also an extensive water spray system with around 800 nozzles which had to be controlled accurately to ensure a correct cooling process of the material. 

 

The entire cable length summarized to 500 km. Heart of the system is the central control room where the operator personal can inspect and control all stages of the casting process any time at 26 monitors. The visualization intentionally concentrates on the process essentials; only alarm signals are highlighted.   

Conclusion
PROFIBUS is well known worldwide and a leader in all process industries as fieldbus technology which provides high performance and reliability combined with in depth application experiences. This has been impressively demonstrated once more by the Dillingen project which was implemented on time and meets all of the challenging customer demands.   


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