Green Steel Manufacturing MES & SCADA System

Mar 5

Traditional steel manufacturing processes are extremely bad for the environment. They requires a considerable amount of consumable materials, create massive amounts of CO2, and they also require a lot of energy—in the form of burning natural gas in large furnaces. Making different alloys also requires costly catalysts and other materials.

Since nearly every industry in the world has a continually increasing need for more steel, many companies are seeking more cost-effective, efficient, and environmentally sustainable ways of creating steel.

One successful approach (born from the processes used with aluminum and titanium) is Molten Oxide Electrolysis, or MOE for short. MOE uses a molten electrolyte solution on top of molten ore, along with anodes suspended into the solution. This enables electrolysis to produce more molten metal. The byproducts of this process are oxygen and various steel alloys. The electrolyte solution’s composition determines the makeup of these alloys.

Recently, Corso Systems worked with the leading USA-based company driving MOE steel production. We helped develop a SCADA system to control, monitor, and their operate MOE processes—from a bench-top scale proof of concept cell to a scalable production cell capable of meeting any possible demand.

Solution

Inductive Automation’s Ignition Platform
B&R PLCs
Simulink Model Based Design Platform
MySQL Database

Implementation Summary

Corso Systems worked closely with the customer’s engineering team. They had developed a fully-detailed Simulink model that followed the S-88 standard for managing the overall process hierarchy. By using S-88, the engineering team was able to build out a complete model of their production system including every device, process control tuning parameter, and the overall control hierarchy.

For the first phase of the project, the Corso Systems team built Perspective templates for each control device type and configuration including instruments, pumps, motors, electrodes, process data maps, servo controls, and more. Corso Systems rapidly and programmatically developed the templates with the scripting capabilities of Ignition. Then, by re-running the script against any database changes to the model, Corso Systems could continue modifying the templates as needed during development.

Once all of the device templates were created, the Corso Systems team worked with the customer’s engineering team to build process overview screens for each portion of the process. This required more manual intervention to properly create piping for each device’s connections. However we were able to speed up the process with CAD drawings of the equipment and our experience building Map-Based SCADA Systems to automatically generate a baseline version of the screen. This first draft required only minimal adjustments and placement of the faceplates for pumps, motors, valves, instruments, etc. on the screen.

Once the first machine was completed and fully operational, Corso Systems worked with the client to build out tools for automatically generating as many of the objects and screens as possible for multiple additional scales of the machine as they ramped up to production scale cells. This approach significantly reduced the development time for future implementations and allowed the customer to take over most of the ongoing maintenance tasks for the project moving into the future.

Project Innovations

Global Search Functionality in Ignition

By leveraging the S-88 standard’s process model, we easily mapped out a search feature in the project. Users can search for any device number in a field in the project’s navigation bar, and automatically navigate to the correct process overview screen to find a device detail popup with a single click.

Training with Real-World Data on a Simulated System

Training operators to use this complex steel production system was a critical function of the SCADA system. To manage this we created a separate “Training” version of the project with a different color scheme. This project was connected to their test stand, a PLC running the Simulink model with a full simulation of the real process based on real-world data. Operators can now train on actual data coming from the simulation, with an exact 1:1 copy of the SCADA system. The customer’s engineering team can keep the training and production systems in sync using project inheritance in Ignition.

Results

Corso Systems was able to work with the customer to rapidly develop and deploy a SCADA system to meet their extremely aggressive timeline. We accomplished this by leveraging the powerful scripting engine in Ignition combined with the power of Simulink to build a model of the process. The S-88 design methodology also helped the customer’s engineering team speed up development efforts with a copy of the process model (stored in a database) to script device and tag creation across the entire project.

By working a few steps ahead of the customer’s engineering team the entire time, the Corso Systems team helped them meet their deadlines to unlock additional funding. Now they have the resources to scale the system faster than previously anticipated. We were able to help get them into production six months ahead of their original goal.