The production of pig iron is a continuous process that takes place in gigantic blast furnaces. In their so-called furnace cycle, the blast furnaces are in operation 24 hours a day for up to twenty years, during which they require a constant supply of raw material. This material is supplied via a skip hoist, which need to have extremely robust designs and operate with no downtime in order to reliably transport the material into the blast furnace.
Blast furnace skip hoist: guaranteeing a reliable supply of raw material
Skip hoists transport the raw material required for pig iron production from the smelter level to the furnace head. Here, the so-called agglomerate, a mixture of iron ore and aggregates such as limestone or gravel, is fed into the combustion chamber together with coke. Depending on the size of the furnace, this procedure involves mastering differences in height of up to ninety meters. Getting blast furnaces back into shape for the next production cycle after their many years in the furnace cycle often also requires modernization work on the skip hoist. These modernization measures usually focus on precise control and the high degree of robustness and availability of the hoists on the whole.
Digitalization by Hübner-Giessen
At a steel works, the outdated sensor technology for the speed control on the motor and for the positioning on the drum of a skip hoist needed to be replaced with a modern system. We were contracted to find a solution that would simplify the mechanical installations, improve the control and precision of the entire system and reduce its susceptibility to EMC interference. Find out why our U-ONE universal encoder system was the best option for this task in our case study “Blast furnace / Skip hoist: higher precision and better availability thanks to retrofitting with U-ONE”.