Shop-Floor Screens and 3D Digital Twin Architecture in Meltshop and Continuous Casting (CCM) Plants

1. Step-by-Step Screen Workflow on the Meltshop Floor

Meltshop manufacturing consists of sequential metallurgical processes operating under extreme temperatures and tight time windows. The shop-floor architecture is structured around 5 primary stations: Raw Material / Scrap Charging, Primary Smelting (EAF / BOF), Secondary Metallurgy (LF / VD), Continuous Casting (CCM) and Cooling Bed / Billet Yard.

At each station, operators work with focused Production Operator Dashboards (POD) tailored to their specific process step, while shift supervisors coordinate inter-station pacing across all active heats from the Scheduling and Meltshop Management Cockpit.

[1. Scrap Bucket / Torpedo Car Weighing Screen]
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[2. Arc Furnace (EAF) / Converter Heat & Alloy Consumption Screen]
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[3. Ladle Furnace (LF) / Vacuum (VD) & Spectrometer Analysis Screen]
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[4. Continuous Casting (CCM) Cockpit & Intermix Segregation Screen]
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[5. Turnover Cooling Bed, Robotic Barcoding & Billet Stock Screen]

2. Spectrometer Integration and Intermix (Mixed Casting) Control

As soon as liquid steel samples taken during secondary metallurgy are analyzed by the optical emission spectrometer, results appear directly on Ladle Furnace and Quality Assurance screens. The system compares 13 chemical elements and Carbon Equivalent (Cev) values against the order's target steel grade recipe and highlights out-of-tolerance elements visually.

When consecutive heats of different grades are cast without changing the tundish on the continuous casting machine (CCM), the transition zone (Mixed Casting / Intermix) is tracked by tonnage and strand position on a dedicated screen and isolated from standard prime billets.

• Station-based automated ferro-alloy, cored wire, oxygen and electrical energy consumption reporting
• Ladle and tundish refractory lining life and cycle-count tracking
• Strand-by-strand semi-finished goods receipt of cut billets with unique barcode and heat number

3. 3D Meltshop Digital Twin and Thermal Monitoring

Complementing tabular operator screens, the 3D Meltshop Digital Twin renders scrap bay cranes, the electric arc furnace, ladle transfer cars, the 4-strand continuous caster and the turnover cooling bed with live PLC and MES telemetry.

Plant managers switch between standard industrial rendering and the 1640°C thermal heat map mode to inspect active heat temperatures, ladle positions and billet cooling gradients from a single control screen.