For a customer involved in the steel manufacturing industry, AcQ has developed a highly accurate and reliable measurement and control system (MMC).
Making steel is a complicated chemical process, which involves heating iron in a vessel and inserting oxygen and other substances to remove unwanted impurities from the iron. This process is called basic oxygen steelmaking (BOS). When the process has reached the desired chemical composition, the converted is tilted and the steel is tapped.
Measuring when the steel has reached the desired chemical composition was traditionally done by means of laboratory analysis of a sample of the steel, which takes a significant amount of time. Our customer uses a more direct and faster way of determining this composition, by means of a probe with sensors which is lowered into the steel. The MMC system is attached to this probe by cables snaking up to hundreds of meters through the harsh environment of a steel plant. The MMC is able to measure these sensor values with an accuracy below a microvolt, as well as control the probe and provide real-time feedback to users and plant management systems.