[Ongoing] ArcelorMittal Acindar electrical and automation upgrades

In January 2020, the bar mill drives and first phase of the wire rod mill were upgraded at the ArcelorMittal steel plant in Villa Constitución, Argentina.  The commissioning took place during a maintenance shutdown where the Acindar and Russula team were on-site to ensure that the two mills successfully returned to production as scheduled. The goal of the upgrades was to replace legacy electrical and automation equipment that had become obsolete with first-line control and hardware to improve rolling reliability and performance.

Scope of Supply

The scope of the two-phase upgrade included the roughing and intermediate mills, 2 strand wire rod outlet including the Kocks block, crop and cropping shears, quenching treatment, pinch roll and laying head, cooling, and coil handling area.

New ABB DCS880 drives were supplied to replace the existing drives of the bar mill. Electrical engineering, integration of the drives into the existing control system, supervision installation and production support were also included within the scope of supply. The existing DCS500 wire rod drives were upgraded to DCS800 for the transfers cars, Kocks block, crop and chopping shears, pinch roll and laying head.

Following the successful implementation of the first phase, Russula won a contract to upgrade the automation of the wire rod mill in June 2022. The second phase entails upgrading the existing wire rod mill ABB AC450 controllers and IO signal cards to an AC800M model and its corresponding cards, which will be mounted in new cabinets. New Siemens Simotion positioning systems and logic will replace the existing systems for the shears.