First Next Step Package project sold in Korea. The end user is Alcan Taihan Aluminum Limited (ATA) who was established in 1999, a joint venture company between Alcan Aluminium Limited (Alcan) and Taihan Electric Wire Co., Ltd. (TEC). ATA serves domestic market in Korea and export markets throughout Asia with it's quality rolled products for end users in construction, distribution, electrical and beverage can industries. The current product mix of the two mills includes soft and medium-strength flat-rolled alloys for the fin, foil and industrial product markets, as well as the electronic, lithographic sheet and automotive markets. In addition, ATA is also serves the growing aluminum beverage can market in Asia with an increased output of can sheet products for can bodies, and tabs.
ATA has 4 set of Series Six PLCs as main Hot-Mill controllers for flat-rolled alloys of Roughing Mill and Finishing Mill. The system was engineered and installed with Series Six PLC about 10 years ago. Due to the discontinuance of Series Six modules, ATA decided to upgrade to GE Fanuc Series 90-70 PLC. But only CPUs and communication modules in main racks are upgrading at this time. All ladder programs developed in Series Six are converted to VersaPro, a Windows based programming software in Series 90-70. The existing Series Six I/Os will be connected to S6PIO modules installed in 90-70 rack. There are about 30 DC2000 drives and 3 Silcometic drives from GE Industrial Systems. These drives will communicate to DLAN module in 90-70 rack. To provide a more accurate control system and easy-to-configure solution, existing resolvers and APM will be replaced to new resolvers, which will be connected to GE Industrial System's Innovation Series Controllers.
This project was competed to foreign engineering company, but we are able to provide a more close support, proposal and at lower price. ATA wants domestic partners for the future support. The key managing leader of ATA side is Bill Kraeling and K.S.Han. Due to GE Fanuc's scope is bigger than others, we approached as a turnkey contract to GE Fanuc APO and sourcing the engineering service from GE IndSys Service team in Korea for Drive portion. The program conversion from Series Six to Series 90-70 is programmed by local SI, AceComtrol who has many years of experience in Series Six PLC system. GE Fanuc Korea team is responsible for testing, commissioning, supervising and co-work the critical part during the integration of the whole project.
ATA has selected CIMPLICITY HMI in replacing their old DOS based OIS. Now, they are installing 4 CIMPLICITY HMI packages in the plant and 4 more nodes will be added, to handle major controls and monitoring system in their plant. The challenge of this project in on the tight schedule that ATA has, it has to be finished within 10 days of summer shutdown period.
VMIC, now part of GE Fanuc, their Reflective Memory Real-Time Networking (RTnet) solution was the standard LAN solution used by Alcan worldwide. Reflective Memory a high speed, real-time, and deterministic network. The act of writing to the reflective memory causes the local data on all the nodes to be automatically updated. Reflective Memory allows applications on separate computers to share data without the evolvement of an operating system. This RTnet will be installed on 2nd phase in next year.
