The virtual rolling mill – enhancing product development and commissioning

Abstract

Achenbach supplies worldwide with first-class customized rolling mills and machinery for the manufacturing of flat-rolled products from non-ferrous metals. In order to fulfil the customer-specific production requirements, Achenbach developed a wide variety of options for specific subjects. The control of the strip quality parameters like flatness or thickness in the rolling process is a key performance index. An increase of computation power in the field of industrial computers gave a chance to develop more complex model based control algorithms, which led to a significant improvement of the strip quality. In addition it gave an impulse for the development of a comprehensive mathematical model of the rolling mill. This paper presents the general virtual Achenbach Rolling Mill which is a digital representation of the rolling process in general and the behavior of the major actuators in the rolling process in detail. The behavior of drives, strip-tensions, and roll-gap is simulated in a multi-variable real-time environment. In the same environment the OPTIROLLi3® - model based controls can interact with the virtual machine. A vast number of challenges of the real rolling situation can be demonstrated by working on this ‘mill simulator’ and improved solutions are developed taking advantages from this platform. As the virtual machine allows all kinds of virtual testing without scrapping ‘real material’ a wide range of applications is possible for this virtual rolling mill. Some results from the SIL (software in loop) simulation will be presented for better clarity.