9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

Summary (200 to 300 words) should be concise and contain all sufficient information for a fair assessment: The market requires that steelmakers of high quality products assure and are able to give proof that their steel is defect free. In a caster, in order to discard portions of defective steel, it is necessary to identify their locations and crop them out. Wasting portions of good steel during this process could cause a serious problem for caster yield. When a significant steel defect is detected by the automation system, two main functions need to be performed. First of all, since a defect may occur in the middle of a cut piece, the planned cuts must be rearranged in order to crop the defective steel out and minimize the waste. Then the position and length of the defective segment must be accurately tracked from its point of origin throughout the caster so that it can be removed at the cutting station. In casters with soft reduction, the latter becomes significantly more complex, because both the cross section and speed of the steel change as an effect of the dynamic reduction. In this article, we will describe an integrated automation software solution which implements these two features at once: guarantee that the final product is defect free and maximize the amount of good steel produced by the caster.