Sidenor Thessaloniki choses Russula to upgrade 800,000 tpy merchant bar and wire rod mill

Sidenor Group (Steel Industry of Northern Greece) has contracted Russula for a complete electrical and automation revamp of its merchant bar and two-strand wire rod mill located in Thessaloniki, Greece. The hot rolling mill has an annual production capacity of 800,000 tpy and produces reinforcing bars, squares, rounds, equal angles, beams, UPN channels and wire rod.

The steel mill in Thessaloniki began operations in 1962. It is Sidenor Group’s first production facility. As such, the current mill control layout is a combination of different hardware platforms and software generations from many automation suppliers. As a result, the main goal of the electrical and automation upgrade is to replace obsolete equipment and simplify the control platform, which will improve maintenance and troubleshooting.

The scope of supply for the 15-stand mill includes all equipment from the roller table after the reheating furnace to the bar outlet dividing shear and the reforming tubes of the wire rod mill outlet. The existing Toshiba PLCs will be replaced by new Siemens S7-1500 PLCs for the continuous mill and wire rod outlet. Other PLCs will be converted into new remote IOs. Russula will equip the mill with new Delta loop scanners, DC Sinamic drives for the stands, a new main pulpit desk for the control room, iba data acquisition system, HMI WinCC interface specifically tailored for the rolling mill process.

A full factory test of the HMI, PLC and I/O will be performed in October in the Russula workshop, prior to shipment to Thessaloniki. Start-up of the upgraded mill is scheduled for mid-December 2019.