The second largest Russian metallurgical industry player, Severstal Joint Stock Company produces almost 9.6 million tons of steel per year. To achieve the high-set goal of the world industry leadership, the company management relies on the cutting-edge process automation technologies, on staff and equipment efficiency improvement, on product quality, production costs control and environment protection.

Since 1998, Severstal has been using integrated TRACE MODE SCADА & Soflogic system. Throughout this period, the system served as a base for dozens of control systems. Firstly, Severstal deployed TRACE MODE SCADA system to automate its agglomeration production. The aglomeration is used in preparation of high-quality raw material for blast-furnace production, i.e. sintering iron/ore concentrates, recycled material, blast-furnace dust, scale, and other metal-containing materials with a required volume of flux metal. Generating a half of the enterprise emissions, it has one of their severest impacts on the environment.

Basically, Severstal's specialists used the integrated TRACE MODE SCADА & Soflogic system to develope a control system for a charge preparation plant at the agglomeration shop No.2 (AS-2). Since then, this application has been becoming more complex, with the ever growing number of the automated facilities. The managers urged for a secure and scalable software solution to back up their high-set business efforts. They finally looked to the integrated TRACE MODE SCADА & Soflogic software, which has now become the main tool for automation system development and deployment at Severstal's agglomeration. It has a proven track record of optimal and manageable control, collection and presentation of the process parameters.

Today Severstal's SCADA TRACE MODE is having control over:

the control system of proportioning charge materials at the agglomeration shop 2;
the control system of tape slipping at proportioners, charge waste transportation;
equipment at the agglomeration shop 2;
the control system of sintering at the agglomeration shop 2;
the control system of proportioning charge materials at the agglomeration shop 3;
the control system of sintering agglomerate in the automatic facility No.10 at the agglomeration shop 3;
the control system of sintering agglomerate in the automatic facility No.11 at the agglomeration shop 3;
the inventory control system at the agglomeration shop 3;
the control system of the gas-mixing station at the agglomeration shop 3.

Adding greatly to process control and technology parameters visualization, SCADA TRACE MODE-based control system also backs up data, generates alarm reports, communicates technology parameters to MS SQL Server installed at Severstal data center and creates process video animation.

"By implementing TRACE MODE SCADA, we have secured process transparency for all control stages both at the aglomeration and other shops within this process," says A.N.Markelov, manager at Severstal's Administration of Automation. "We have given up dozens of logging devices. The data stored at local and central archives is used for various operations from economic calculations, energy carrier control, cash cost estimation, reporting, calculating costs and equipment downtime, assessing final quality to calculating bonuses for specific teams.". It took just 5 man-months to develop the control system of the agglomeration shop.

The control system deployment enabled:

reducing second-best by 52%;
reducing coke consumption for 1 ton of cast iron by 2.62 kg per ton;
reducing overall coke consumption of the blast-furnaces by 244 tons;
deployment costs by $9.356;
annual savings (June 2002 - July 2003) of $165.000;
20-day ROI of the control system.

Moreover, the aglomeration changeover added to environment protection by reducing the atmosphere emissions by 25% in the last 5 years.

For streamling agglomeration production, in November, 2003, a number of Severstal employees received Academician I.P.Bardin rewards, with TRACE MODE certified specialists. Following the successful deployment in the agglomeration process, SCADA TRACE MODE helped realize the potential of Severstal's blast-furnace shop.

This included:

the control system of air heating and cooling unit covers at the blast-furnace No.2;
the control system of the blast-furnace No.5 cinder granulation;
the control system of top charging at the blast-furnaces No.1, 2, and 3.

Severstal has also automated the Europe largest blast furnace Severyanka (No.5).

Being a very complex and heat-producing unit, a blast-furnace needs total process control, since discrepancy of even one parameter might cause a heavy breakdown. In September, 2003, Severstal people were giving their blast-furnace No.2 of 1 thousand sq. m. a 38-day 2-grade overhaul. This enabled mounting and implementing the SCADA TRACE MODE based control system. The system has control over the temperature of the blast-furnace cover, the covers of four air heaters and hot blasting fittings, the cover of the blast-furnace in the taphole area, and also delivers temperature threshold emergency alarm to the LED screen and the Simatic blast-furnace controller.

Besides monitoring the covers temperature, SCADA TRACE MODE logs the parameters of water cooling of blast-furnace, taphole and floor coolers, as well as ventilation of the blast-furnace bottom, thus having control over all temperature parameters of the blast furnace molten zone.

The control system of the blast-furnace No.5 cinder granulation at the blast-furnace Severyanka No. 5 powered by SCADA TRACE MODE modules the cinder granulation. The system includes two TRACE MODE controlled granulation operator's workstations, granulation supervisor's workstation, network equipment, two enclosures with ADAM 5000Е controllers and periphery.

Besides monitoring granulation process, SCADA communicates the blast-furnace data to MS SQL Server at the blast-furnace shop and uses ОРС-exchange to receive data from the other SCADA systems of the control system at the blast-furnace No.5 that was previously not available. Today an engineer has access to all information about both units operation from any granulation facility. Deploying a new system enabled giving up disk-based self-registering controls, and controlling both granulation units from any operator's panel, as well as the granulation supervisor' cabinet.

Severstal now looks to implementing SCADA TRACE MODE Web-technologies at top management workstations. And they are still after improving the agglomeration shop operations. Now, they need to upgrade AS-2 proportioning system using PRC-TM processors for Lomicont-110 controllers and SCADA TRACE MODE DoubleForce RTM hot-standby module for critical processes.