Efficient control system for steel melting process

The trend in high grade steel production is to employ an electric arc furnace rather than an open hearth furnace. The existing controls with direct components for the electric arc furnace are less efficient in many ways. Also there is no perfect isolation between the control system and power stage. Moreover as the operation takes place at high power levels, the system excludes some parameters as they can not be accommodated. This results in loss of efficiency and increase in tap to tap time. In order to eliminate the above defects, a dedicated microprocessor based control system has been developed to control the electrode movement for optimum power consumption. Simultaneously data logging is carried out to display various parameters on the operators´s console. The control system was tested both in auto and manual modes. The precommissioning results were compared with the characteristic responses of the conventional system and were found to be superior