Project Introduction: Steel mills are industrial plants for turning molten steel into ingots, billets, and plates. These mills are high temperature, high risk environments prone to outbursts of fire. Since the factory area is too large for the workers to monitor at all times, it's very difficult to enforce safety measures in the event of a fire or other accident. These types of accidents can lead to loss of life, production time, revenue and more. The third largest steel mill in the world is in Korea, and they were experiencing a high volume of accidents each year. In order to improve safety, they tried implementing various new systems, to no effect. Therefore, they called in Advantech to help them establish a proper monitoring system to increase safety and improve production.

System Requirements: Safety is the first priority in steel mills, where large risk factors are always present. A fire monitoring system needed to be applied for strict monitoring of the equipment and working environment. The largest problem found was that the quality of wiring within the mill was old and very poor quality. Compounding this issue was the fact that the existing system was dependent on sensors and cables only. The system should be stable, reliable, and be able to send signals to the central monitoring room in the event of an accident, so appropriate safety actions can be taken.

Project Implementation:

ADAM-5000/TCP: 8 slot Distributed DA&C System

ADAM-5051D: 16 channel Digital Input Module

ADAM-5068: 8 channel Relay Output Module

ADAM-6050: 18 channel Isolated Digital Input/Output Module

ADAM-4571: 1-port RS-232/422/485 Serial Device Sever

System Description: Since the factory area is so large, the transmission route between fire enunciator and receiver can't be changed. A control module is applied to transmit messages between the receiver and all disaster monitoring departments. Advantech's ADAM-5000/TCP is a distributed control module which uses the existing network backbone as the basis of the new system.

The disaster monitoring departments use the ADAM-5051D digital input module to input alarm messages while all the fire equipment (water sprinklers, fire extinguishers and alarms) use the ADAM-5068 digital output module. The existing communication port employs ADAM-4571 and other modules to transmit the messages to the disaster monitoring departments in each factory, so real-time communication is accomplished between the departments in each factory and the central disaster monitoring department.

Conclusion: After implementing this fire monitoring system, factory workers can work hard in a safe environment and have the peace of mind that corrective actions can be taken in case of an unexpected accident. This ADAM-based system contributes a lot to decrease the fire rate and increase the production capacity. The mill was very satisfied in the respect that the system was constructed at a low price point while still solving the large issue of the existing wiring problem. The new system contributed to the improvement of overall safety, and endeavors are being made to apply Advantech's disaster monitoring system to other mills currently under construction.