More productive, hard as steel!

As the world's leading steel producer, steel giant ArcelorMittal focuses on the very latest production technologies. The aim is to make its own production processes permanently safer and more efficient. That includes burner monitoring of the furnaces in its cold rolling mill: the plant in Ghent is used to refine steel coils (strip steel rolls) in accordance with customers’ requirements. However, to enable the steel strip to be cold-formed, it must first be heat treated. So 50 main burners, fed by 30 start-up burners, heat the annealing furnaces to a constant 1200°C. Significant downtimes and exhausting troubleshooting were the rule when the burners failed. After the retrofit, the automation system PSS 4000 now guarantees smooth and productive operation, due also to accelerated fault diagnostics, among other things.

In addition to using PSS 4000, Arcelor Mittal also commissioned Pilz to completely overhaul the plant. One challenge in this modernisation process was the frequent shutting down of the start-up burners that ignite the main burners, which repeatedly led to extended outages. The existing burner control module and flame monitoring via UV cells were not an optimum solution: as soon as one of the cells was defective, the entire plant was often stopped for at least 40 minutes, as the analysis options when searching for the defective UV cell were limited, costing valuable time. The current solution replaces the UV detectors with ionisation; the tasks of the burner control module are performed by the burner management software package from the automation system PSS 4000. Now the processes don't just run virtually undisturbed – with rapid diagnostic options thanks to efficient visualisation in the control cabinet, which constantly displays the exact status of the 10 burners, longer downtimes are a thing of the past.

• Plant downtimes are reduced due to accelerated fault diagnostics
• One-stop retrofit. Components, service and support as an all-round package
• The burner application could be implemented to meet the customer's specific needs using the PAS4000 software from the automation system PSS 4000

With 168,000 employees in 17 countries, ArcelorMittal is the world's leading steel producer. The Belgian sites alone, of which Ghent is one, produce more than 6 million tonnes of steel each year. Key industries include automotive and mobility, construction, energy and packaging.