Articles

Russula, an engineering company specializing in automation projects for rolling mills, has installed and used the IBA high speed data acquisition system in over 20 production process start-ups. The system reduces production downtimes by 50% during project commissioning.

Introduction

A data acquisition system provides many advantages during the process of automating and maintaining an industrial facility. The IBA PDA system is designed to capture and record signals from the entire industrial process, which makes it possible to monitor in real time the status of the process, keep track and store signal data for days, months or even years.

Electrical and Control Layout

A typical rolling mill process is controlled by a series of networked PLC´s forming a distributed control system such as seen in diagram 1, each PLC is allocated to receive signals from different parts of the rolling mill. The IBA data acquisition system is a single record for all the process signals and allows the user to visualize what is happening in the entire process. This aids in diagnosing problems and failures as well as compare the process signals of one product to previous recorded historical data of the same product.

Diagram 1: Rolling mill process electrical and control layout

Russula found the IBA system minimizes downtime in commissioning rolling mills

The installation and start-up of a new control system often has many unpredicted problems that can extend the time to start-up a process. The more information that the start-up team has to review and diagnose the cause of the problem, the faster the team can commission the new system and production process. The IBA PDA tool receives data and collects the data history from the critical signals of the process. The IBA Analyzer allows the team to visualize the signals, create historical reports and anticipate possible failures that have not yet occurred.

Russula estimates that having an IBA system installed during the start-up of a rolling mill can approximately reduce the commissioning time by at least 50% compared to not having the system.