22 June, 2012

AUTOMATION OF THE HOT DIP COATING PROCESS

Compiled By: Rajesh Soni

Introduction The objective of the hot dip coating process is to apply coating to steel strip, which satisfies downstream processing requirements. This will be the case when the automation controls the significant process actuators & operations in a manner, which equals or exceeds the performance of operator best practice across the entire product range. Historically, coating mass automation schemes have automated one or two of significant degree of freedom, namely knife pressure and/or horizontal position. This leaves several significant operations in the hands of the line operator. As the number of significant process operations which are automated to a high performance standard is increased, the process is transformed from a semi automatic operation with variable quality results dependent upon operator skill, into a consistent efficient & effective automation operations. If the coating is too thick, the weld may not be strong enough to permeate to the coating to the base material, too thin coating could result in excess zinc being removed & blowing trough the material completely. Clearly, the need to produce consistent, high quality coated metal with the lowest possible variability in coating weight. Hot Dip Coating Process Preheated steel strip is passed through a molten Zinc bath & then travels vertically out of the bath carrying along a layer of liquid Zinc on its surface. As the strip passes through a pair of air knives, a large portion of the liquid Zinc is removed by the action of the knife stripping air jet & gravity. The amount of coating remaining on the strip depends primarily on the speed of the strip, distance of the knives from the strip & air jet pressure. Coating Mass Control The coating mass applied to strip steel must be controlled on top & bottom surfaces, across the width & along the strip length. Coating mass measurements are made in g/sq. meter or coating thickness measurement that are directly proportional to mass per unit area. Many equipment deign & operating factors influence the mass & distribution of Zinc coating as it is being applied on a strip, but only a few of these can be manipulated on-line by the control sysetm or operator. Uniformity of coating in the hot dip process begins with the uniformity & stability of the air jet used for wiping. Knife design, operating conditions & characteristics of the wiping medium determine the quality of the jet. To efficiently & effectively produce hot dip coated product the following tasks need to be performed well.

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Machine direction-coating control to ensure that the average & minimum single spot coating requirements are satisfied. Cross direction-coating control to ensure that deviation from the average coating across the width of the strip in minimized. Manage the transitions between orders to minimize footage with off-target coating. Optimize coating mass targets based on real-time operating statistics to minimize zinc consumption & potential for galvanized powdering. The process variables that affect coating weight are the following: 1. Air Knife pressure. 2. Air knife distance from the strip. 3. Line speed 4. Air knife angle & elevation from the bath. 5. Strip thickness. 6. Pot temperature 7. Strip flutter 8. Strip surface roughness 9. Strip temperature. 10. Strip shape. Of these variables, the first six are measurable. The first three affect the strip coating thickness to the great extent. In controlling coating thickness, six actuators, two pressure controls & four knife corner positions must be utilized at frequencies corresponding to measurements & controllable disturbance, since they have a very rapid effect on coating thickness. For production optimization, line speed control is also used. Furthermore, the process will be instrumented to provide a subset of the following measurements. Coating mass profile. Pressure feedback from control valves, and/or from within the knife header. Knife position feedback: horizontal, vertical & angular. Pot roll position feedback. Pot temperature feedback. Line speed & tension feedbacks. Weld position signal.

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Hot-Dip Coating Weight Control Strategy Coating weight measurement provided by the measuring heads are processed by the microprocessor units & control the coating by the following means. Control of air pressure. Preset of blower speed (to keep valve position within controllable range). Preset of knife position & control of knife position. The software package contains four control loops: Feedback regulation of air knife pressure based on coating weight deviation. If a large change is required, the knife to strip distance recommendation is dissent to the knife equipment to keep pressure with in working range of the pressure control equipment. This loop contains delay to allow for material transport from air knife to gauge. Feed forward regulation is predictive dual function near-immediate control loop of air knife pressure based on either line speed changes or changes in air knife to strip distance. Mid range is secondary regulation of air knife to strip distance based on exceeding the normal operating range of the air knife blowers. Air knife to strip distance is modified based in the ratios of top & bottom coating weight, air nozzle pressure & air knife position. Skew control, which corrects cross-sheet coating weight deviation by adjusting knife angle with respect to the strip. Each of these loops can function individually or in any combination to make concurrent corrections to air knife pressures & position to maintain the desire coating. These are independent control loops for top & bottom air knife controls. Coating Weight Optimization Product optimization While the standard control package will keep production of coated product at a specified target, optimization controls will ensure that this target is indeed the optimum. Th optimization control functions have the higher-level of responsibility of controlling the coat weight targets, preside, to achieve desirable conditions such as:

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Maximization of coating material savings. Maximization of production throughput. Minimization of quality rejects. Minimization of production lost time.

Using real-time statistics & suitable safety factor, two minimum coating mass targets are generated for each surface, one based on the average coating mass distribution & other based on the minimum single-spot distribution. Then, for each surface, the higher of the two targets is applied as the coating mass aim to make certain that both average & minimum singlespot requirements are satisfied. Process optimization Process optimization can be used in two key area production i.e. speed optimization & automatic gauge optimization: Production speed optimization: Production speed optimization can be used on certain grades of product which extra capacity exists in the air knife pressure system or the furnace. Line speed can be slowly increased to increase production throughput, while quality criteria & process limits are violated. In order to avoid excessive line speed changes, the optimization gain is adaptive: the adaptation ensures that line speed changes will be function of that process variable that has the minimum capacity or is the closest in violating its process constraints. The total coat weight control algorithm will increase air pressure to compensate for faster speed. Automatic grade change: When used with a tracking system, this package uses total coat weight feedforward to adjust air pressure & air knife position to the new grade of product as the weld passes through the airknives. By instituting automatic grade change, the reject material at the head & tail of a coil between grade changes is reduced to minimum. Conclusions Application of uniform zinc coating in two dimensions (transverse & longitudinal) on two surfaces of the sheet steel is a challenging control problem that requires advanced control & modeling methods to function in well co-ordinating design. 1. The coating measurement is performed by scanning radiation gauge, which typically scans at speed in the range of 25 to 150 mm/s & may take 5 t0 20 s to scan across the strip & also the location of most coating mass gauges is typically of the order of 100m downstream from the gas knife.

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Previously, many automation systems awaited for the completion or for a scan & the return scan before generating an estimate of the average coating for use in feedback control. This approach has since been superseded by the use of least square error techniques & kalman filters. Every second these signal-processing techniques provide multiple (5 to10) estimates of the parameters require for feedback control. At transitions between different coating type, the use of Kalman filters reduces the time to produce a reliable estimate of the coating parameters to the time taken to scan 75% of the strip width. This compares favorably with standard least square techniques which usually require the completion of a scan & the return scan before having reliable estimate of the average & skew in the coat on each surface. The most effective solution for overcoming the long time delay is the placement of a coating gauge in close proximity of air knife (300 to 1500 mm), but the gauge require to withstand that temperature is very expensive & also have difficulties to operate. For this time delay compensated controller such as smith predictor are seems to be very useful. Smith predictor controllers allow the use of aggressive control tuning for fast response without the instability problems experienced by standard PID controllers. When such a controller is combined with more sophisticated types of signal processing, & an internal model controller of the referred to earlier, then typical performance achievable is the removal of 90% of any detected error within one coating gauge scan. 2. The machine direction is significantly influenced by the horizontal knife position, the pressure within the knife & the knife gap. The horizontal position & knife gap adjustment actuator systems typically have response time constant of order of 0.2 s. In comparison the pressure control system typically has a time constant of order of 5s. With respect to precision, a 0.127-mm in position error or a 0.2kPa pressure error within knife header results in a 1.0-g/m2 deviation in the average coating. While these figure vary across product range they may be taken as indicative. This is clear that use of the pressure control system as the primary actuator would involve considerable lag in response & performance degradation when compared to use of positioning system. However, the pressure is easy to measure & manipulate these considerations lead to the choice of position as the primary control actuator with pressure control used as appropriate for surface quality & dross management & to extent the range of control when positioning limits are approached.

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3. In the cross machine direction control we are concern with correcting skew, crossbow & edge defects. a. The skew defect is effectively controlled with the use of differential horizontal position trims to align the knife with an arbitrarily strip passline. b. The edge defects such as buildup are either passive device such as edge buffles, or active such as variable gap knives. Edge baffles function by creating pressure & flow distributions in the strip edge region, which reduce the tendency for edge buildup. Variable gap knives, when in operation, are capable of significantly reducing edge defects. c. The crossbow defects of the strip are generally between 10 to 40 g/m2. Using touch rolls does the minimization of crossbow defect to the extent of 5 g/m2. But due to surface considerations, these are not of much use. In this situation the use of pot section tension control using hot bridle & horizontal intermesh of submerged pot rolls are very effective. Intermesh control utilize the measured coating crossbow & the coating mass model to produce an estimate of actual bow in the strip. This is then feed to smith predictor feedback controller, which adjust the pot roll intermesh to main crossbow, within acceptable limits. Constraints The horizontal distance between the knife lip & strip, which has been discussed as the actuator of choice for high performance coating mass control, is not directly measured in existing equipments. The relationship between absolute jet to strip distance is subject to time varying offset due to passline motion & lack of rigidity in the rig. This is the question of how to generate absolute position references for setup of new coil & avoid the potential for the knife collide to strip. At present the difficulties outlined above have been successfully overcome by employing an inverted form of the Navier Stokes model to estimate jet to strip distance based on measured coating mass, pressure, speed, angle & nozzle gap. This creates a soft sensor for the jet to strip distance which when combined with relative motion feedback from the horizontal rig position actuator has proved sufficiently accurate & robust to allow position to be used as the primary machine direction control actuator.

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Summary This is clear that statistical analysis of control performance is desirable for management of process yield, throughput & coating metal consumption. Different items of information are required for monitoring the performance on to coil-to-coil basis, in a more general sense, over a range of products & multiple coils. A coating mass classifier is required to generate information which may be used to analyze top & bottom side coating distribution along the coil as well as to provide an average performance for the whole coil. Because of effects associated with the transit at the head & tail end, separate sets of results are calculated for the head body & tail sections of the coil. The overall philosophy behind the method of coating line monitoring is that the maximum amount of automatic processing complete before it is recorded. This allows investigation to be readily conducted at the required level without sifting through a large volume of irrelevant information. References a) Automation of the Hot Dip Coating Process By George Voss & Glen Wallace b) Coating mass control on galvanizing line at LTV steels By James Adams ( Manager computer systems technology center, Ohio) c) DMC closed-loop air knife control for galvanizing lines By Vincent E.Harries ( Project engineer, Data measurement corporation, Gaithersburg)