9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

The modern continuous casting machine is a highly complex mechatronic system where utmost precision has to be reached to ensure high product quality while the equipment has to be designed to withstand the harsh environmental conditions. These two requirements alone would make things difficult, but additionally the lowest operation costs have to be achieved to survive under highly competitive market conditions. During operation of a continuous casting plant, one key to reach high product quality at low cost are good maintenance procedures. The design of the whole equipment should be optimized for maintenance. One example is the newly developed SRD segment where a highly complex system has been designed from scratch with a focus on high maintenance friendliness. The feature of single roller unit exchange should further improve plant availability. Modern technologies subsumed under the buzzword “Industry 4.0” are used for improving maintenance procedures. Examples are an intelligent equipment tracking system, an automatic test procedure and to smarten up equipment by saving data on the equipment. So the combination of maintenance friendly mechanic, proper maintenance workshop concept, automated test procedures with built in quality checks and proper reinstallation in the machine will finally improve the reached product quality and reduce the operational cost. In this paper, several examples are given how components of continuous casters can be exchanged quickly, checked for problems, repaired and tested and brought back to the machine. Additionally examples are given where with technology consulting the performance of a plant could be improved.