Electrical Locmotives
Following years of development and field validation, significant progress has been achieved in automated control and driverless operation for electric locomotives. This technology has been successfully deployed at operational sites including the 7-metre coke oven at Xinyu Iron and Steel, the 7-metre coke oven at Pangang Vanadium, and the 7-metre coke oven at Zhongtian Steel.
The electric locomotives are equipped with all necessary devices for fully automated operation, including: positioning encoders, encoder readers, coarse positioning systems, PLCs, HMIs and wireless data transmission devices, variable frequency speed control systems, precision transmission systems, and accurate braking systems.
The electric locomotives feature manual, semi-automatic, and fully automatic control modes.
In semi-automatic mode, the driver manually inputs the target furnace number; in fully automatic mode, the ground coordination system controls the locomotive's autonomous operation. During automatic and fully automatic modes, the locomotive's stopping positioning accuracy remains within ±30mm.
Recommendation
The automatic positioning system functions as follows: autonomous travel and positioning to destination, positioning interlocking, and position recognition.
The locomotive sequentially performs the following functions via single-point positioning: Coke bucket rotation started → Coke collection → Coke bucket rotation stop → Travel to dry quenching station → Receive empty bucket → Slow travel repositioning → Deliver full bucket→ Travel to next coking chamber for subsequent cycle operation.
Fully Automatic Mode:
In this mode, coke oven operations proceed according to information such as the pushing schedule provided by the coke oven DCS system. The coordination PLC transmits required information to corresponding equipment. Upon completion of one cycle operation, the machinery receives instructions to commence the subsequent cycle operation.
Semi-automatic Mode:
In semi-automatic mode, the operator initiates each functional sequence, such as travelling to the next coke oven and so forth. In this mode, the equipment interlocks remain identical to those in automatic mode.
Interlock Manual Mode:
In this mode, the operator must initiate each individual action, with interlocks identical to those in automatic mode.
