Improvement of Consumer Properties and Stability of the Technological Process of Hot Rod Stock Production

Abstract

High-speed automated systems of management and control which include mathematical models of technological processes nowadays serve as a basis in the manufacture of competitive products in different fields, including metallurgy. A reliability of such systems and reproducibility of results finally provide for the stability of complicated metallurgical processes. To secure the stability of the technological process of manufacture of high quality products and introduction of new product ranges, the issues of revamping of a Hot Rolling Mill are still one of the priorities of modernization of the JSC «NLMK» (NLMK). Commissioned at the end of the 60s, 2000 Mill during the last years was subject to fundamental modernization when new equipment and automated systems were installed to measure parameters, collect and process information. However, these means are sometimes used for a local control based on the disturbance principle to return the process parameters to the set range, while the information systems exist only for the operative registration of the production flow. This is in fact necessary, but nowadays it is evidently not enough. Especially, at introduction of end-to-end technologies of metal production. To effectively manage the quality of metal production at all stages of end-to-end technology, we witness at present a shortage not of technical means, but of artificial intelligence, that is, a set of algorithms and monitoring programs which can solve the following basic tasks: − forecasting the structure and qualities of the ready products based on the actual parameters of treatment at each process stage; − preventing adverse results of disturbances by correcting the further technological operations (regimes); − designing technologies during expansion of production range. The Lipetsk State Technical University (LSTU) jointly with the NLMK Information Technologies Department has developed a number of PC applications which have been successfully introduced at 2000 Wide Strip Continuous Mill [1]. Within the frameworks of this publication, we analyze two main systems which determine the factors of the consumer qualities of the rolled stock, namely, «Hot Rolled Stock Structure and Qualities Forecast System» and «Strip Surface Quality Control System». The applications realized in these systems have a set of their own program modules.