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Member News
is the most advanced production facility in our industry worldwide.”
Close partnership for world’s most advanced tube plant
In 2008, SMS group erected a PQF® seamless tube plant for Tenaris at its mill in Mexico. Norbert Theelen, Head of Long Products at SMS group, adds: “We had already built a seven inches PQF® plant for Tenaris in Veracruz, Mexico. Building on our experi- ence from this, our experts worked closely with the customer’s teams to set out objectives for the new plant and had already agreed their planned course of action during the engineering phase. There was intensive cooperation among all parties involved, that is, between Tenaris, our Tube and Pipe Plants division in Mönchengladbach, SMS Innse in Milan, and SMS Elotherm in Remscheid. We got together for regular steering committee meet- ings to ensure there was a con- tinuous exchange of information and ideas. It was this close part- nership that enabled us to meet Tenaris’s precise requirements.”
During the construction phase, an average of 1,400 skilled spe- cialists, tters, technicians, and
engineers were deployed on site, which covers an area of 110,000 square meters. The rst pipe was rolled in October 2017, and the plant was of cially inaugurated in December. Thanks to the very close proximity to the customer and the cooperative development of new plants and processes for new materials, SMS group is bring- ing its motto of “Leading Partner in the World of Metals” to life. The cooperation with Tenaris was an example of this.
SMS group supplied the plant technology and related engi- neering for its construction, and was responsible for the erection and commissioning supervision, including customer training. The main units of the PQF® plant include:
Billet preparation section and saws
Rotary hearth furnace
Barrel-type piercing mill with Diescher disks, equipped for the rst time with a hydraulic adjustment system
PQF® rolling mill of BCO design Extracting mill
Induction furnace for shell reheating
24-stand stretch reducing mill
Cooling bed and batch layer saws
Cost ef ciency thanks to extensive automation and maintenance-friendly design Compared to previous industry standards, the new Tenaris plant is twice as ef cient when it comes to high-quality seamless tube production. This is made possible thanks to, among other things, the high degree of automation and the use of robots, which convey the steel from one station to the next in a fully automatic process. Most of the crew works in the control room, in adjacent buildings, or below the produc- tion line, where they have easier access to the machine compo- nents for maintenance purposes. “Our process is fully automatic”, says Curá. In addition, every tube is given an identi cation mark, similar to a barcode, meaning the customer can trace the precise speci cations using a scanner or smartphone.” In view of the chal- lenging conditions in oil or gas elds, this smart means of tracing
ITAtube Journal No2/July 2018
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