California Steel Industries, Inc. (CSI) recently completed a five-year, $265-million modernization program focused on the company's No. 2 Continuous Galvanizing Line.

The project comprised implementation of a high-speed data acquisition system from Binnington Development Corp., using technology from GE Fanuc Automation, a unit of GE Infrastructure. The line has helped the company to significantly decrease downtime and scrap due to unscheduled shutdowns, and to achieve significant cost savings, with project return on investments (ROI) in less than three months. The new system has helped California Steel increase the line's exit by 3-4 seconds, alleviating a process bottleneck and enabling faster production speeds. The system has also helped to boost product quality by ensuring smoother production, and now provides a means for analysis and long-term continuous improvement.

CSI offers a broad range of thicknesses, widths, and coatings of galvanized products. The company’s two galvanizing lines each focus on different thicknesses and unique customer applications. CSI produces very light, very high quality steel on No. 2 Galvanizing Line, often in the range of .0098-inch gauge. The team runs an average of 300 tons per shift, and speed and quality are essential. The galvanized steel from Line No. 2 usually gets fabricated right into end products for building and construction such as HVAC, roofing, decking, flexible conduit, studs and siding, walk-in coolers and drop-ceiling rack systems. The finish must be exceptional, as customers often paint the steel prior to fabrication and require a smooth, consumer-ready finish.

The team on No. 2 Galvanizing Line needed to improve productivity by reducing unexplained shutdowns that were occurring approximately every three weeks and lasting 10-15 minutes. Each shutdown resulted in lost production time as well as material scrap.

"Production runs so fast and is such a series of complex processes that in many cases, our system could not log the data at a high enough resolution to capture the reasons for the line stop," explains Lead Electrical Maintenance Electrician Larry Gantner. "We were trying to troubleshoot with any data that we had, but the potential was there to lose thousands of dollars per minute during each line stop."

In combination with GE's hardware and software technology, the CSI and Binnington Development engineering team implemented a FOCUS high-speed data acquisition system. With high-speed data acquisition, CSI can optimize processes using information from the controllers to reveal small flaws in process sequencing. For example, valves opening fractions of a second too soon or too late, motors starting or stopping a few hundredths of a second late, and sensors not being detected in a timely manner are common sequencing errors that may only be in the range a few hundredths of a second and not be detectable with conventional means. Now, with the ability to detect small flaws, CSI has the opportunity to make corrections for a dramatic cumulative improvement.

"In steel processes, it is critical for timing to be right," notes Senior Electrical Engineer Marc Sandford. "Galvanizing — normally — doesn't stop for anything. And, if we can increase speed, we can lower costs."

California Steel Industries, Inc. (CSI) is a collaboration between Japan's JFE Steel Corp. and Brazil's Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD). The company is a leading producer of flat rolled steel in the Western United States, boasting the widest range of products. California Steel has more than tripled its production output since its founding in 1984, and has grown by 100% just since 1992.