Chinese Steel Mills Leveraging Low Latency of 5G for Efficiency
Strategic Research Institute
Published on :
18 Nov, 2021, 5:19 am
People's Daily reported that the integration of 5G technology into the industrial Internet has helped improve the quality and efficiency of China’s traditional iron and steel industry by accelerating the application of products with big data-based functions such as remote control, collaborative operation and troubleshooting in recent years.
At the steelmaking zone of a wide and heavy plate plant run by Hunan Valin Xiangtan Iron and Steel Co Ltd in Xiangtan in central China’s Hunan province, four large electromagnetic bridge cranes are busy attracting scrap steel with a weight of several tons and then moving it accurately onto a truck. The bridge cranes are remotely controlled from a central control room. Taking advantage of the ultra-high reliability and ultra-low latency of new technologies, the plant realizes the ultra-high-speed uploading and downloading of data, thus allowing workers to control the equipment accurately and remotely
Shougang Jingtang United Iron and Steel Co Ltd in Tangshan city in north China’s Hebei province has set up a management system that can monitor in real time the operation of the four main devices of coke ovens, namely coke pusher, coke barrier vehicle, coke quenching vehicle and coal charging car. These machines playing different roles are closely connected with each other and form an organic and unified whole through the transmission of signals. Besides real-time monitoring of the four main devices of coke ovens, the management system enables man-machine dialogues, allowing workers to give orders to machines. The four devices can send their operating data to the central control room
After upgrading key basic equipment by combining 5G and the industrial Internet, Ansteel Information Industry Co Ltd based in Dalian in northeast China’s Liaoning province has enabled data collected by sensors installed in equipment, such as temperature, vibration, pressure, and flow, to be transmitted to a cloud platform in real time to realize real-time monitoring, diagnosis and troubleshooting for equipment with the help of artificial intelligence and big data analysis
As a typical process manufacturing industry, the steel industry is characterized by continuous production process and requires timely transmission of large amounts of information in a complex environment, something that the company’s former information system can no longer sustain. Therefore, the industry is in urgent need of intelligent transformation.