Indian state-run steel producer Steel Authority of India Limited’s (SAIL) Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) has installed an upgraded and automated system raw material handling plant, a company statement said on Tuesday, March 19.
It said that the upgraded 1771 series of RIO modules for PLC and Automation system in Phases I and II of the Raw Material Handling Plant (RMHP) have been operationalized.
According to the company, both Phases I & II of RMHP cater to unloading, stacking and dispatch to Blast Furnaces 1, 4 and 5, Sintering Plants 1 and 2, the LDBP and Calcining Plant-2. The Rockwell-make PLC was commissioned in 1994. In its electrical control system, the installed 1771 series modules became obsolete over 10 years ago. These module component manufacturers stopped manufacturing the components. In order to maintain the operation, defective modules were repaired in-house. However, over a period these spares also became exhausted, resulting in an emergency condition.
The RMHP team took up the challenge and prepared a scheme, as per which a new Control Logic I/O (Input/Output) module was procured and the aging Data Highway Plus network was replaced with fiber optic and ethernet technology for faster data transmission, increased bandwidth and improved reliability, the company said.
The execution period for this project was eight months, but was completed ahead of schedule. The retrofitting of 34 RIO stations and laying of 20 km of fiber optic cables for the PLC & Automation system of the RMHP in 13 different sub-stations of Phase-I & II were executed in a phased manner with staggered small shutdown durations, without seriously hampering production, the statement said.