China News Service, Xiangtan, June 6, title: New changes in China's steel industry: "hand in hand" 5G busy transition workers are "liberated"
Author Wang Haohao
Walking into the production workshop of Hunan Valin Xiangtan Iron and Steel Co., Ltd.'s five-meter wide and heavy plate plant, there is no steel worker, and the production environment is clean and tidy.
Where did the workers go?
In the smart center of the five-meter wide and heavy plate factory not far from the workshop, clean and tidy staff are proficiently operating in front of the computer, monitoring and controlling everything in the workshop in real time.
This is a true portrayal of the production workshops of most companies in the steel industry in China.
With the continuous development of new technologies such as 5G, big data, and cloud computing, China continues to make efforts in the fields of new infrastructure, artificial intelligence, robotics, and green energy to further promote the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry.
The steel industry is constantly transforming and upgrading.
Taking Valin Xianggang as an example, it has vigorously promoted the construction of smart factories as early as 2016.
From 2016 to 2019, Valin Xianggang has successively launched more than 100 digital intelligent transformation projects, and created more than 10 key intelligent manufacturing projects such as automatic steelmaking and continuous casting robot automatic slagging.
Compared with 2016, the labor productivity of Valin Xianggang increased by 54% in 2019.
Valin Xianggang, founded in 1958, is one of the five medium-sized steel companies with an annual output of 500,000 to 1 million tons of steel in the "three, five, eighteen, and eighteen small" strategic layouts of the new China's steel industry.
Today, it has become the manufacturing base of 10 million-ton fine steel products in southern China and the largest wide and heavy plate production base in the world.
At present, Valin Xianggang has made full use of emerging technologies such as 5G, machine vision, and artificial intelligence to develop enterprise-integrated smart centers and systems for online monitoring of equipment status, automatic slagging by robots, and unmanned cranes, etc., achieving China’s first chain-based The 5G+microwave thermal disaster recovery solution based on the on-off/SLA index is also China’s first 5G+MEC to be put into production in the factory field.
The smart center of the five-meter-wide plate factory can use the 5G network to be compatible with the system data of each main control room in the continuous casting, steel rolling, finishing, and finished product areas, and integrate production operations, data storage, intelligent analysis, and visual display.
The center contains about 700 on-site industrial video points, which can meet 1000 channels of on-site high-definition video access capabilities.
“In the past, the operation platform of the workshop was far away from the rolling mill, and there was a certain lag in information communication. There was a distance of more than 100 meters between rough rolling and finishing rolling. We had to constantly run back and forth between the two to update information. Now the steelmaking and rolling process We can deal with any abnormalities in the process in just a few seconds in the smart center.” said Xie Ruiyong, the leader of the rolling squad at the five-meter wide and heavy plate mill of Valin Xiangtan Iron and Steel Co., Ltd., who worked in Valin Xianggang in 2009.
Xie Ruiyong witnessed the transformation of Valin Xianggang from manual steel rolling to smart factory.
"The smart factory can be said to'liberate' our steel workers." Xie Ruiyong said. In the past, about 15 workers were working on the rough rolling mill and the finishing mill. Can't bear it; I'm exhausted after working 8 hours a day in summer.
Now more than 80% of the steel workers who were on the front line before are transferred to work in the smart center.
The wisdom center of the five-meter wide and heavy plate plant is just one of the many application achievements of Valin Xianggang actively "handing in" 5G.
The company has developed a 5G inspection drone swarm air-ground integrated intelligent flight system. These drone swarms can take the place of workers to "post", and carry out data and video backhaul, storage and analysis through the in-plant 5G private network covering the ground and the air. Intensive inspection of plant personnel, standard inspection of construction sites, command and disposal of emergencies, and automatic patrol of the plant throughout the day.
Not only Valin Xianggang, reporters inquired about public reports and found that Shougang, a "century-old shop", has also been refined into "smart steel". Since 2019, Shougang Jingtang, China Mobile and Huawei have jointly explored and used 5G to promote steel The depopulation and unmannedness of all aspects of the enterprise has increased production efficiency by about 15%; Baosteel, Hegang, Liugang and other enterprises are also relying on 5G to implement intelligent application practices.
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