TPT September 2008

Tumicon – mill management and control tool for advanced stretch reducing blocks Dr rer nat Stefan Willems, general manager technology and electrical, Kocks Technik GmbH & Co KG, Mr Jörg von der Heiden, marketing manager, and Mr Jörg Surmund, area sales manager, Friedrich Kocks GmbH & Co KG

1. Introduction With the introduction of the stretch reducing block (SRB) [1] , a highly flexible tool for finish rolling of tubes has been made available on the market. Individually driven stands (and even rolls), quick roll changing, adjustable stands and remote control enable the user to handle production in a new way. Mill output is increased due to a number of technological features including short stand spacing for minimizing the heavy end losses, dynamic drives that allow individual speed control for each stand (eg for wall thickness control), and free-size rolling [2] to enable the rolling of different dimensions without roll or stand change. Even though previous stretch reducing mills (SRM) were equipped with technological functions such as heavy end control (HEC) and automatic wall thickness control (AWC) [3] , their effect was limited (eg to the abilities of the group drives [4] ). In order to handle all the new features, Kocks has developed an integrated management and control system branded Tumicon, which can be applied to all types of stretch reducing mills. However, most of the management functions are dedicated to the new SRB. This article describes the main functions of the Tumicon system. 2. The Tumicon family The chart below (figure 1) shows the components of the Tumicon system:

Mill manager Program for the setup calculation, parameter changes, roll inventory, stand management and pass design. TecBox High-speed control system (VME-Bus real time system) for the speed control of the motors. This is the hardware for the techno- logical functions of the Tumicon system such as HEC and AWC. Inspect HMI-system for the technological functions of the Tumicon system. Used to change parameters and visualize the process. Remote adjustment Hardware of the remote adjustment system for the Kocks SRB. With this system the three last rolling stands can be adjusted. Remote adjustment program Visualization for the remote control. 3. Tumicon mill manager The Tumicon mill manager is a windows program, which can be installed on standard PCs. The Backbone is an Oracle database, where the configuration data and results are stored. The system is a multi-user. The program is normally installed in the planning office and in the roll shop. Additional installations can be in the main pulpit and the quality control office.

The database should be installed on a separate server. Each Tumicon PC requires an ethernet connection to the database server.

 Figure 1 : Components of the Tumicon system

3.1 Tumicon modules The diagram (figure 2) shows the Tumicon modules required for the setup calculation. The rolling sequence is defined in the ‘products’ module. Together with the rolls coming from the ‘roll inventory’ module, the motor speeds and remote control data can be defined. Other modules are used for administration and configuration of the system. The system handles different types of stands such as rolling stands with different roll diameters and dummy stands. For an easy update of the pass design an import function is available.

195

www.read-tpt.com

S eptember 2008

›