STEELMAKER IMPROVES roller table reliability with AC drives

摘要

With 80 rollers to transport finished steel billets a manufacturer has retrofitted four VSDs from ABB to control motors in a bid to avoid disruption and minimise downtime. A steel maker is improving the reliability of its roller table by retrofitting four ABB variable speed drives (VSDs). The roller table has 80 rollers to transport finished steel billets at Celsa Manufacturing's plant in Cardiff. Each drive controls four banks of 20 roller motors. Celsa's existing roller table drives were obsolete. "The drives could not be interrogated to discover what they are doing or what condition they are in," explains electrical engineer Nicholas Drane. "It was getting difficult to source spares for them. We had tried using another manufacturer's drives to replace them but these needed extra components such as RC filters and braking resistors and we never managed to make them work in the way we wanted. This lead to a lot of lost production which as a 24/7 operation we cannot afford."