◎ Hao Zhangcheng
| Since its establishment in 2003, SNTON Steel Cord has withstood the “tempering” of fierce market competition, and interpreted a legend of rapid development of economies of scale. In the development process of 15 years, SNTON Steel Cord has become a leading enterprise in the top three of domestic framework materials industry, and a model enterprise of green and intelligent development pattern by leaps and bound. |
SNTON Steel Cord dares to be the first in the indus-try, and has resolutely embarked on a road of green environmental and intelligent development. In 2016, SNTON Steel Cord was included in the national “informatization and industrialization” integrating management system standards-implementation pilot unit. In 2017, “high-precision special steel wire intelligent manufacturing project” was included in both the “Intelligent Manufacturing Pilot Demonstration Project” list and the “Pilot Demonstration Projects for Manufacturing and Internet Convergence Development” list of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In the same year, it was rated as one of the four companies that made “Outstanding Contribution Award” to the development of the industry by China Rubber Industry Association Framework Materials Specialized Committee.
The reporter makes in-depth understanding and interviews on the achievements SNTON Steel Cord has achieved in green and intelligent development.
Exploration: Transforming to Green Production Pattern
Social development has entered an era of multiple constraints on resources, energy and environment. Making full use of new technologies, new processes and new equipment to realize green, circular and low-carbon economic development pattern of resource recycling and energy gradient utilization, becomes an urgent need for the enterprise to develop in the future.
The “Green Production” project of SNTON Steel Cord was launched in 2016. Adhering to the development concept of “Technology Comes First, and Green Goes Together”, the Company started from each process of steel cord production, and deeply analyzed the continuous improvement points of each link. After nearly two years of exploration, it has formed a unique green production pattern of the industry.
In the dry-drawing pretreatment process, start from the treatment of the wire rod, the decorticator, wire brush and high-pressure water are used to rinse and remove the scale on the surface of wire rod, and the magnetic roller filter is used to absorb the iron filings in high-pressure water. At the wire-collecting end of the dry-drawing machine, the dry powder-removing device and safety dustproof device are developed and designed to effectively suppress the spread of wiredrawing powder in the air.
In the heat treatment of electroplating process, SNTON Steel Cord completely abandons the heavy metal lead, and the process design of water bath plus intermediate frequency furnace realizes the stability that the lead bath can bring. The hydrochloric acid online sealing and treatment technologies are used to automatically adjust the air volume and water volume of the acid mist washing tower according to pH value, thereby effectively preventing the diffusion of hydrochloric acid. The waste acid recycling device has also been developed, which not only reduces the usage amount of hydrochloric acid, but also greatly reduces the sludge deposition. It can achieve the green environmental protection while reducing the operating cost of the enterprise.
In the wet-drawing process, various properties of the wet-drawing lubricant are controlled to meet the stringent standards to ensure the stability of the lubricant. In the treatment of lubricants, the lubricant solid phase extraction device is jointly developed with Tsinghua University to precipitate the impurities of lubricant and achieve lubricant recycling, reducing the usage amount of lubricant by 30%.
The Company attaches great importance to the treatment of “three wastes”. Natural gas is used to replace raw coal, and gas boiler and gas heating furnace are equipped with denitration facilities to ensure that the industrial waste gas is far below the national standard. The wastewater treatment process is continuously optimized, and the industrial wastewater can be directly used for fish farming through wastewater degreasing device and waste acid recycling device. The combined operation of sludge drying device and waste acid recycling device minimizes the output of solid waste sludge.
SNTON Steel Cord not only pays attention to the generation and disposal of pollutants, but also focuses on energy saving and green energy. It transforms the light source, and uses LED lighting, saving electricity by 70% compared with traditional lighting. Photovoltaic power generation is used on the roofs of plants, with a total installed capacity of 20 MW. The annual power generation can be 24 million kWh, and 3,000 tons of standard coal can be saved.
Transformation: from Traditional Processing to Intelligent Plant
“Post-80s and post-90s generations have become the main sources of labor. They require self-development and value embodiment, thus it is difficult for them to adapt to and be satisfied with the same work in the production workshop like a machine.” Zhang Yantao, executive deputy general manager of the Company, said that the steel wire products industry was the typical discrete manufacturing industry, with large labor demand, many process control points and complicated control. Automated and intelligent upgrades and transformations must consider how to effectively reduce the labor intensity of workers, and solve problems such as data collection, data analysis and data application.
After nearly two years of investigation and demonstration, SNTON Steel Cord Company decided to break the traditional discrete manufacturing thinking. At the beginning of constructing the third plant project, it combined with emerging industries such as automation, Internet and big data, to make it an intelligent production base of high-precision special steel wire.
With the successive completion of infrastructure equipment, informatization and automation construction, the intelligent model factory of framework material industry finally achieved success in 2017.
In terms of informatization construction, SNTON Steel Cord has developed data acquisition and analysis, QR code system, procurement and delivery, equipment and energy management systems etc.
The establishment of an industrial-grade communication network has formed a manufacturing system that integrates intelligent production and network. The industrial wireless network coverage rate in the workshop reaches 100%, and employees can check and manage data in real time through wireless terminals. Real-time data is displayed centrally on the large screen of the central control room. Through the MES system and the SPC system, all collected data are automatically analyzed to monitor whether the production process is normal.
In order to solve the problem of difficult product traceability and low traceability, QR code management system is introduced, so that all raw material product batch number, materials, machine and employees can be “traced by one-click”. This can not only ensure product quality, but also understand and solve customers’ feedback better.
All equipment in steel cord industry is operated by electricity, and the electricity consumption of SNTON Steel Cord is nearly 400 million kWh per year. In this informatization transformation, the Company built an energy demand side management platform to summarize and analyze the energy consumption of all equipment, improving the energy utilization by 10% and reducing the energy consumption by 7%.
In terms of automation construction, the Company has created a material transfer system, automatic product testing and packaging and intelligent and stereoscopic warehouse.
The capacity of the third plant is 150,000 tons/year, which means at least 300,000 tons of materials should be transferred every year. Relying on manpower is inefficiency and needs huge quantity of labor. The Company uses gantry robots to automatically allocate box according to customers’ standards, and joint robots can automatically pack. Combined with AGV trolley and automatic roller conveyor belt, according to QR code on the materials, automatic and accurate sorting and conveying can be achieved. While reducing the labor intensity of employees, it can also eliminate the occurrence of mixing, and reduce product quality problems which are caused by human factors. Automated testing equipment can effectively improve testing efficiency, reduce labor intensity, and improve product quality, reducing labor costs by nearly 50% for the enterprise, and improving product quality stability by nearly 3 percentage points.
A set of data given by SNTON Steel Cord shows that intelligent equipment can replace traditional labor and paper information, improving production efficiency by 30%, reducing labor cost by 45%, shortening product research and development cycle by 30%, and reducing product defective rate by 20%. The product qualification rate can reach more than 99%, and the energy utilization rate is increased by 10%.
“After our preliminary calculations, labor cost is saved, equipment productivity is increased, and the loss resulting from quality instability is reduced. It is expected that the investment will be basically recovered within three years.” Zhang Yantao said that after further improvement of the current automation program, it would be promoted and replicated in Plant one and two, to further reduce operating costs and improve product quality. By then, SNTON Steel Cord will truly become one of the automatic and intelligent production bases of the global wire products industry.
