For steel companies, safety work is particularly important. The steel industry itself is a high-risk industry with high temperature, pressure, flammability, explosiveness, toxicity and harmfulness. As the scientific and technological content of steel enterprise production continues to increase, the degree of automation gradually deepens, and the scale of the enterprise also expands accordingly. Therefore, enterprises must make full use of modern technology from many aspects such as management and monitoring to enhance personnel safety awareness and improve steel plants’ safety.
1. Systematically consider the supporting and guaranteeing role of safety production at the overall strategic development planning level, and use the advantages of third-party organizations in macro policies, regulations and standards, process technology, etc. to carry out safety customized consulting services to effectively improve the safety production awareness of personnel at all levels of the enterprise. , safety production skills and accident prevention capabilities.
2. Increase investment in safety, strengthen the intrinsic safety of equipment and facilities and the construction of fixed operating environment equipment, accelerate the elimination of backward and high-risk process technologies and equipment, promote mechanized replacement of personnel, automatic reduction of personnel, and informatization empowerment, and implement the online management of major hazard sources Monitoring and early warning technology can realize equipment safety and technology safety upgrades, and improve enterprise safety production conditions from the source.
3. Continue to comprehensively and systematically carry out hidden danger investigation and management. In accordance with national and industry standards, focus on major hazard sources in key links, key parts and key processes such as high-temperature molten metal areas, gas systems, flammable and explosive areas, and limited space operations, promptly investigate and rectify hidden dangers, and effectively manage and control major hazards. Security Risk.
4. Improve the soft environment construction of enterprise safety production, strengthen the implementation of safety production responsibilities, build a safety risk management and control system, promote the dual prevention mechanism of risk management and accident hazard investigation and management, deepen the construction of safety production standardization and standardization, carry out in-depth education and training work, and improve enterprise safety management and control level and security capabilities.
5. Strengthen the construction of enterprise safety informatization, build a visual and intelligent platform system, improve the rapid perception, real-time monitoring, early warning, emergency response and system evaluation capabilities of the entire process and all elements of safe production, and realize the transformation of safe production from passive prevention to source Management, proactive management transformation, and solidify the hardware foundation of enterprise safety production.
6. Actively introduce external professional organizations to carry out safety diagnosis and assessment of the production system, use professional forces to objectively examine all aspects of the company’s safety production, jointly formulate professional rectification and improvement plans, strengthen the systematization of the company’s internal safety management, standardization of operating behaviours, and improve safety risk management and control ability to continuously eliminate safety hazards and unsafe factors.
The following introduces the specific scenarios of safety hazards in steel plants and how to effectively avoid safety hazards and improve the safety of steel plants through robot substitution.
Industrial robots reduce safety hazards in steel mills and provide steelmaking site safety levels
1. Unmanned large-bale continuous casting
Continuous casting is the central part of the iron and steel industry, and it is the key link to realize the efficient and high-quality production of steel billets. Quality is difficult to guarantee and other issues. The application of industrial robots replaces most of the current manual operations in the ladle area to reduce the labour intensity of workers and ensure that operators stay away from dangerous areas of high-temperature liquid metals, greatly reducing safety risks while ensuring the quality of billets.
1.1 Potential safety hazards in continuous casting
1) Assembling and disassembling the slide cylinder is a high-risk and heavy physical labour.
2) Since there are many procedures for installation and replacement of the long nozzle, including disassembly, cleaning of the bowl, installation of sealing rings, insertion and removal of argon gas pipes, etc., many operators are required to cooperate to complete the process. This area has large dust, high temperature and strong heat radiation, It is easy to cause burns and scalds for the operator, and there is a great potential safety hazard.
3) Oxygen burning and drainage operation is carried out by manually holding a long oxygen-blowing tube to burn through the upper nozzle at the bottom of the ladle from a long distance. Key processes such as oxygen-burning tube ignition, oxygen flow control, and prevention of molten steel back-suction rely heavily on operator skills and experience. It is a technical operation with high difficulty, high risk and instability, and there are great potential safety hazards.
4) The temperature measurement and sampling of the tundish are due to the difference in the operation skills of the operators, which leads to the interference of the temperature measurement consistency, the measurement rate and the sampling success rate by artificial factors; the dust in this area is large, the temperature is high, and the heat radiation is strong. The situation of scalding appears, and there is a big safety hazard.
The intelligent continuous casting robot realizes the automatic disassembly and assembly of the large ladle sliding nozzle oil cylinder and the automatic insertion and insertion of the medium pipeline through visual positioning. The steel pouring side is based on two six-axis industrial robots, which are respectively arranged on the second and third platforms of the ladle. Using the flexibility of the robots, the automatic disassembly and assembly of the long nozzle, oxygen burning and drainage, temperature measurement and sampling of the tundish, and insulation coverage are realized. agents and other main functions. In this way, the unmanned, intelligent and high efficiency of the entire continuous casting process is realized.
1.2 Intelligent continuous casting platform robots are mainly used for the automation and intelligent operation of the following whole process:
1) Automatic assembly and disassembly of the slide cylinder;
2) Automatic plugging and unplugging of energy medium tubes;
3) Automatic replacement of the shroud;
4) Automatically clean the long nozzle bowl;
5) Automatically add sealing ring;
6) Automatic oxygen blowing and drainage;
7) Tundish automatic temperature measurement and sampling;
8) The tundish automatically adds a covering agent.
1.3 Intelligent continuous casting platform robot has the following advantages
1) The transformation of the ladle on site is extremely small, reducing the total investment cost of the project, and does not affect the use of other continuous casting machines;
2) The design idea that fits the actual working conditions on site truly realizes automation and high-efficiency oxygen burning and drainage;
3) Strong universal applicability, not limited to specific slide mechanisms and nozzles;
4) Improve the level of production automation;
5) Improve the production process, increase the yield, reduce the loss of aluminium and the increase of nitrogen, and the production quality is stable and controllable;
6) Improve the success rate and stability of temperature measurement and sampling;
7) Realize the operation of the ladle platform with fewer people to the greatest extent;
8) The working environment is improved, the labour intensity of workers is reduced, the safety performance is improved, and the occurrence of safety accidents is reduced.
2. Steel plant slag removal robot – to solve potential safety hazards in the electric furnace smelting process
During the smelting process of the intermediate frequency electric furnace, a large amount of scum will be generated, which will float and condense on the surface of the molten iron. If the scum is not removed, the quality of the molten iron will be affected. At present, the method of slag removal in most foundry industries is relatively traditional—the slag remover wears protective gear and stands close to the furnace mouth, and it is not safe to pick up slag outside the furnace with a long iron fork, sparks, and molten iron.
The temperature in the furnace can reach 1500 degrees Celsius, especially in the summer around the furnace mouth can reach hundreds of degrees Celsius, the working environment is harsh; the desulfurization slag has strong adhesion, the slag is heavy together, and the labour intensity of picking out the slag is high, and it takes many times The desulfurization slag can only be picked clean, and the efficiency is low; when picking the slag, a lot of molten iron will be stuck, resulting in a large waste of raw materials.
Undoubtedly, the slag removal robot in the steel plant can perfectly solve these problems. The staff only need to stay away from the high-temperature furnace mouth to operate by remote control, avoiding various dangers caused by close-distance operations, so safety is greatly guaranteed and greatly reduced. reduced the labour intensity of the workers. Moreover, the residence time of molten steel caused by slag removal in the furnace is shortened, the power consumption is greatly reduced, and the production cost is greatly reduced.
The slag-picking robot also has the following advantages
(1) Requirements for the technical quality of the job post are reduced, and only one person is needed for each set (one with two electric furnaces), reducing the number of workers.
(2) The use of this equipment can reduce the amount of slag-gathering agent by more than half.
(3) The mechanical gripper is designed with a special process. During the slag removal process, the action of pouring and squeezing the molten iron is added, which reduces the amount of molten iron carried out with the slag by more than half, and greatly reduces the waste of steel and the amount of waste slag transferred.
(4) Due to the shortened slag removal time and the increased number of smelting furnaces in a single shift, a large amount of power is saved and efficiency is improved.
(5) The use of this equipment can reduce the damage to the furnace due to manual fishing, and greatly improve the service life of the furnace.
3. High-speed wire rod labelling robot – to avoid safety hazards in high-speed wire production lines
When the high-line production line is manually tagged, the C-shaped hook is running, which poses safety hazards to the operators, and has the following problems
1) Manually transcribing information and hanging labels is prone to omissions, errors, etc., resulting in quality objections;
2) The quality of manual hanging self-made hooks is uneven and unsightly. If you choose prefabricated hooks, the operating cost will increase;
3) Depending on the skills of the operator, the standardized operation of hook-making and hanging cannot be realized;
4) High-temperature operation, label printing, threading, hooking and other operations have a large labour load.
Robot automatic labelling can solve safety problems, improve safety levels, greatly improve efficiency and reduce labour intensity. Improve workpiece tracking management and provide effective support for quality traceability.
4. Bundle Bar welding tag robot
The bar production site has complex working conditions and potential safety hazards. Now, automatic label welding robots can be used to realize the functions of automatic label printing, automatic positioning, and automatic welding. The robot has the following characteristics
1) Using artificial intelligence technology, image acquisition and intelligent models, it can independently complete the tracking and positioning of bars/rebar coils, and intelligently determine and select welding surfaces to ensure firmness;
2) Use robot technology to collect secondary automation information, and automatically complete label printing and label welding operations;
3) Data is automatically transferred between systems without manual intervention;
4) Low operation and maintenance costs and fast return on investment;
5) Optimize the number of operators, improve the working environment, and avoid potential safety hazards.
5. Inspection robots ensure safety
The high-voltage power distribution room is the heart of the rolling mill, providing power for the operation of all electrical equipment in the plant. The automatic inspection robot of the high-voltage power distribution room can carry out inspections 24 hours a day without dead ends. Using visual recognition technology, it can detect various The reading deviation of the mechanical watch pointer is compared and analyzed to form an operating physical examination table. Once an abnormality occurs, an early warning can be given to ensure the safe and stable operation of high-voltage equipment.