Employment of state-of-the-art automated process control, based on QNX RTOS v6, improves the performance of blast furnace plants.

Located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Siderar Iron and Steel Company is one of Latin America's leading producers of flat steel products. The company is capable of producing 2.9 million tons of steel per year owing to a series of recent technical innovation projects. Foremost among these is an ongoing upgrade to improve the reliability of its massive iron blast furnace facilities at the San Nicholas Plant.

A blast furnace produces molten iron from raw materials-iron ore, coke and flux materials-, which is charged at the top of the vessel, while a continuous and controlled hot blast of air, is channeled into the bottom. Consistent delivery of the blast air at the required temperature is a key variable. It is a complex and dangerous task, and needs to operate 24 hour non-stop, any interruption can mean financial losses as high as thousands of dollars per day. That is why Siderar was in need of a robust operating system that would allow an easy redundancy in case one system failed.

Challenge

Siderar initiated a progressive upgrade to the control system by developing a proprietary SCADA, called Ivision4, with the view of improving overall production and equipment reliability.

One of the main objectives was to include a blast furnace control system that would provide more accurate control than a manual system, as well as integrating 10 years of historical tag data from its legacy control system.

Solution

That is why Siderar decided to base its SCADA, IVision4 under QNX RTOS v6 operating system. "For 10 years now, we have adopted QNX as our plant base standard, due to its real time performance, its robustness and its fault-tolerance, and knew that upgrading to QNX RTOS v6 we would be assured an easy-migration and the same or better reliability results we received from QNX RTOS v4," said Ulises Bertezzolo - Level 2 Automation Project Leader.

The design team had 10 months to design and implement all the interfaces, models, data storage together as well as develop a completely new SCADA. By being able to share the memory and replicate networks, they could easily share data between the servers and the different platform. "Using the resource manager sped up the development of our server process and the use of threads simplified the servers source code-saving us numerous man hours and productivity, allowing us to even finish one month earlier than anticipated"

Results

According to Mariana Viale, Automation R&D, at Siderar, implementation of the IVision4 control system not only improved the Blast Furnace 2's operating performance, but also increased its reliability. The IVision4 control system model will not only be used at the Siderar plant but many of the developments will also be used at other TECHINT international group plants.

SIDERAR belongs to the Techint group, a major siderurgic group that owns, Siderar in Argentina, Tenaris-Siderca in Argentina, Sidor in Venezuela, Tenaris-Dalmine in Italy, Tenaris-Tamsa in Mexico, Tenaris-Algoma in Canada, Tenaris-NKK-t in Japan and Tenaris-Confab in Brasil.

About QNX Software Systems

QNX Software Systems is the industry leader in real-time, microkernel OS technology. The inherently reliable and scalable QNX^® Neutrino^® RTOS and powerful QNX^® Momentics^® development suite together provide the most trusted foundation for embedded systems in the networking, automotive, medical and industrial markets. Global leaders such as Cisco, Delphi, Siemens, Texaco, and Ford depend on QNX technology for network routers, medical devices, intelligent transportation systems, safety and security systems, next-generation robotics, and other mission- or life-critical applications. Founded in 1980, QNX Software Systems is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and distributes its products in more than 100 countries worldwide.