Siemens Metals Technologies will be supply a Power X-HI type, five-stand, continuous tandem cold rolling mill and a heavy laser welding to Beihai Chengde Stainless Steel (Beihai Chengde), China, for the Beihai plant in Guangxi Province. The rolling mill will have a capacity of 600,000 tons of cold strip per annum, and will be designed to produce AISI grades series 200 and 300. The new rolling mill is scheduled to be commissioned in the middle of 2014. This is the third order that Siemens has received from China for a Power X-HI rolling mill for stainless steels.
Beihai Chengde is active in nickel mining and the production of narrow stainless-steel strip. The company intends to use the new cold rolling mill to start producing wide strip. Total production should reach 1.6Mt of stainless steel per annum as early as 2014, and 4Mt in the final expansion stage in 2015. The continuous rolling mill will handle hot-rolled, annealed and pickled stainless steel. It will be able to achieve exit thicknesses from 0.3mm to 3.0mm from entry thicknesses of between 1.0mm and 5.0mm.
The width of the strip will vary between 800mm and 1,300mm.
The scope of delivery also includes variable-speed Sinamics drives with a total power of 22,000kw, and the basic (level 1) and process (level 2) automation. A Simatic WinCC-based solution will handle the operator control and monitoring tasks. It also enables distributed supervision, and features easy-to-use diagnostic and alarm functions.