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Steel Industry

CMI Industry

Automation solution for a hydrochloric acid processing plant (South Korea)

The company

The CMI Group is an international industrial company headquartered in Liege, Belgium, with annual sales of approximately EUR 500 million in 22 different business areas and 2,100 employees. Through continued growth, CMI is constantly expanding its product portfolio for the steel and iron industry.

As a new Chemical Pool, CMI UVK / Beugin, is assigned to the Industry business unit within the Chemicals division, where the focus is on surface treatment, materials recovery and recycling. For example, UVK offers the chemical treatment part for pickling lines and acid regeneration plants. The business area also includes the treatment of acids and environmental protection. UVK provides project management and process engineering and has offices in Germany, the USA, China and Brazil. In 2004, the UVK Group was able to increase its turnover by 70% with approx. 100 employees, while the operating result was almost doubled.

Task and solution

The task was to automate an acid regeneration using the spray grate process for the second largest steel producer and processor in Korea, Dongkuk Industries.

A ControlLogix from AllenBradley is used to solve the control task.

Due to the spatial expansion of the plant, the individual signals from the field are not connected centrally, but via decentralized remote I/O modules distributed in the field. The individual modules are connected to the central control system via DeviceNet. The complete operation and monitoring is carried out via the INTOUCH process visualization software from Wonderware. The connection of the control system to the control is realized via "Modbus over TCP/IP".

Particular importance was attached to the Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) in this project. The testing of the burner control system can be regarded as critical. In order to test the created PLC software with the visualization as close to the process as possible in advance, the simulation software WinMOD was used. This software makes it possible to map the complete I/O level of the PLC and to run through individual process values, as well as complete temperature ranges, without this having any effect on the real plant. Failures of plant components as well as exceeding and falling below limit values could be tested without any problems. Even complete process steps were tested in advance together with the UVK process engineers, so that the time required for commissioning was greatly reduced and risks for the entire plant could be avoided.

The project in compact

End customer

  •     Dongkuk Industries / South Korea


Spray grate process

  •     throughput 3,500 l/h
  •     hydrochloric acid


Automation technology

  •     control system INTOUCH
  •     PLC Allen Bradley ControlLogix
  •     decentralized periphery with remote I/O via DeviceNet
  •     simulation with WinMOD