Walking Hearth Furnace for Billets
Walking Hearth Furnaces are the best solution to re-heath the billets for challenging application where materials and temperature have to be carefully managed. This typology of furnace gives a good result in terms of specific consumption and strongly limiting the pollutant emissions and today is even more efficient thanks to Digital Solutions, New algorithms and Innovative AI models.
Overview
Walking Hearth Furnaces are the best solution to re-heath the billets for challenging application where materials and temperature have to be carefully managed. The long experience of Tenova allowed a continuous improvement of the process and equipment, assure the maximum furnace flexibility to cope with the specific requirements of the Hot Rolling Mills.
This assures smooth operation and easy maintenance, high final product quality and enhanced sustainability.
A wide range of reliable solutions for the mechanical and for the combustion systems can be combined according to the customers’ requirement.
Combustion systems and burners are specifically designed for a wide variety of fuels, including those ones having a poor Net Heating Value (such as BFG, PG, MG). The use of those fuels optimizes the usage of available utilities and resources at customer’s plant, minimizing the operating costs and improving the overall sustainability.
The best heating performances are achieved combining specific solutions for billets/slab with the latest advancements in Walking Hearth Furnaces design: refractory hearth, process control and on-line mathematical model Level 2 automation as well as advanced burner technology.
In recent years, the proven reliability of Tenova Walking Hearth Furnaces is combined to a new generation of advanced features to shift the Furnace into a high technological production unit. The Digital Solutions, New algorithms and Innovative AI models for enhanced process control and proactive management of the assets assure an increased sustainability and profitability of the furnace system.
Technical data
- Productivity: up to 140 tph for billet and even more
- Furnace’s length up to 34 meter and more
- Specifically designed depending on the steel grades processed: low/medium/high carbon steel, spring steel, bearing steel, alloy, stainless steel, high speed steel, tool steel, high tensile steel, valve steel.
- Billet lengths: 2000 till 15000 mm
- Billet sections: 90x90 mm till 250x250 mm
Benefits and profitability
- Low fuel consumption
- NOx and CO emissions according to Best Available Technologies
- Minimized deflection
- Longer refractory life
- Lack of mechanical marking
- Tenova in-house developed burner to cope with process requirement and to enhance sustainability
- Tenova Flexytech ™ technology gathering all the advantages of sequential firing from the combustion system, plus exactly locate the heat input where it is required across the furnace chamber.
- Hydrogen and hybrid combustion
- Combustion system and burners specifically designed for a wide variety of fuels, including those ones having a poor Net Heating Value such as BFG, PG, MG.
- High plant availability
- Limited oxide scale formation
- Limited decarburization effect
Innovation
Tenova is on the forefront of the innovation: dedicated teams are involving experts for a continuous development of advanced equipment, software solutions and models.
All the equipment are designed and verified under dynamic conditions, which simulate the actual operating condition at plant.
The design on the furnaces is made by in-house software suite Tenova Caltec which includes several tools for :
- 3D heating process modeling
- Billet properties predictions
- Mechanical and handling design
- Combustion system design
The results have been validated through the years by dedicated tests and field data collection assuring the reliability of the software’s tool.
The online mathematical model Level 2 System is a powerful tool for protecting the environment and raising the gains and the final product quality, by:
- A decrease in fuel consumption by promptly adapting the combustion rate to any production rate
- A decrease in NOx and CO2 emissions
- A decrease in decarburization of the billet/slabs with a valuable effect on product quality and quantity
- A precise control of the required dropout temperature with a massive impact to the rolling mill performance
Tenova has a long tradition in leading edge combustion technology and developed an interdisciplinary design process including Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling, industrial scale test and industrial applications.
The above mentioned workflow allows to drastically reduce the time to market for the development of new burners and combustion system.
The Italimpianti furnace department hosts a team of refractory experts which are fully committed to continuously improve the furnace lining performances and reliability by dedicated material selection, relevant engineering, test on field and the release of Tenova’s pre-casted pre-fabricated components.
Safety
Safety is a priority for Tenova. For this reason, the Safety team is directly involved during the engineering and the execution of all the jobs. It performs risks assessment and reduction measures identification detailed processes.
In order to assure the safety of personnel and the protection of the machinery the following solutions are applied:
- Design of machine done to integrate safety solution
- Area segregation (Fixed Fence, interlocked moveable guards with guard locking).
- Safety Automation control with adequate protection against systematic and random faults (Input, Logic and Output of the command circuits compliant to adequate Performance Level)
- Other Specific reduction measures relevant for the identified risks level.
- Information on Residual Risks by means of Safety Instruction, Safety Warnings signs, etc.
Tenova design can be customized and adapted to local safety regulation for manufacturer (EC Declaration of conformity, EAC Declaration of conformity, OSHA 1910, etc.) and relative standards, e.g. (EN, EN ISO, NFPA, etc.)
Automation
Next generation HMI including the following features:
- User-friendly and intuitive HMI with point and click devices
- Diagnostic features allow to immediately recognize the failure and quickly navigate to the failed equipment
The virtualization of the architecture allows the end users to get the following advantages:
- Drastically increased energy savings
- Drastically reduced downtime in case of HMI client substitution
- Get the High Availability (HA) feature for all the servers and all the clients of the while automation architecture
Safety PLC and Safety Field Equipment as implementation of a detailed risk assessment study, that includes:
- Safety functions identification
- Performance Level / SIL assessment
- Safety Function specification
- Verification and validation process
Environment
Energy transition trends push for the steel industry to start decarbonization as soon as possible, besides pollutant emissions have to be considerably reduced. These technical goals are embraced by Tenova with a dedicated Burners Department which through innovation provides for sustainable solutions. Hydrogen burners, high efficiency burners, low NOx and low CO burners are some of the key elements of the Tenova Burner product portfolio which can offer a wide variety of solutions to respect the strictest environmental standard, to lower CO2 emissions allowing for a sustainable production.
Sustenovability - TRGX: Regenerative Flameless Burner - YouTube
The Tenova iRecovery ™ technology allows for plant efficiency improvement by recovering residual heat in waste gases. Waste-to-heat transfer permits to produce steam or pre-heat circulation water.
The Reheating furnace process and related controls by automation system are designed to effectively minimize the utility and resources consumption.
Digital
Tenova Furnace Digital Packages “Tenova FDP” purposely designed for re-heating furnaces shift the furnaces from traditional equipment to more efficient and technological production units.
New algorithms and innovative AI models allow for more profitability of the furnace system as follows:
- Higher plant efficiency
- Reduction of costs related to Fuel
- Improve sustainability
- Improve final product quality
- Condition Monitoring Systems for maintenance
From the synergy of Tenova Digital Teams, IT Teams and domain experts, the Virtual Reality approach is now part of the Tenova job execution from sales and engineering activities till the final user dedicated operation and maintenance training sessions.
Tenova is able to provide for the Real-time navigation for model up to 250 Milions of polygons allowing users to interact with virtualized equipment and machines. The interactive experience can be shared with other teams remotely connected from customers and partners offices or from dedicated VR Rooms available at several Tenova’s offices worldwide.
Tenova adVISOR is your remote mentor on site, guiding you through our experts´remote support, interactive documentation and the use of artificial intelligenc algorithms on real time automation data.
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