Steel Mills

BRS and SMS Team Up for Arkansas Expansion

March 27, 2019

Over the next two years, Big River Steel will expand its Osceola, Ark., flex mill with help again from German plant builder SMS Group. Big River has commissioned SMS to supply mechanical equipment, electrical and automation systems and digitalization.

BRS will add a second electric arc furnace and twin-ladle furnace to the complex, increasing output to about 3 million tons. An additional gas cleaning system will be installed to comply with environmental regulations.

The Continuous Strip Plant (CSP), capable of producing 1930 mm wide coils, will get a second strand, a second tunnel furnace and a downcoiler. Also, as part of this project, the continuous galvanizing line (CGL) will receive an additional coiler.

MET/Con’s product quality analyzer (PQA) will also play an important role in the expansion, forming the central module of the process automation system. The PQA monitors, documents and assures the product quality along the complete production process.

“It uses stored rules defined on the basis of expert knowledge to assess coil quality in a semi-automatic procedure and, based on these assessments, makes ‘ship’ or ‘block’ decisions for the downstream processing of the strip or its dispatch,” explained SMS.

The system alerts operators to irregularities in the production process and suggests countermeasures. “This allows the operators to predictively intervene in the process before an incident becomes a problem, dramatically reducing the occurrence of failures along the production process, which otherwise might have resulted in poor quality and downtimes,” said SMS.

Big River Steel produces high-quality steels, including tube grade sheet for pipeline construction, silicon steels for a wide variety of energy and electric motor applications, and advanced high-strength steels for the U.S. automotive industry.