LadleFill - tapping surveillance

SSAB EMEA in Luleå, Sweden has awarded Metsol to supply a tapping monitoring system for surveillance of ladle metal level during tapping.

The LadleFill system will be used to monitor the torpedo car tapping of hot metal into transfer ladles and assists the operator to detect the metal liquid surface level in order to stop pouring in due time.

Overfilling the ladle above a predefined target level initially triggers an alarm. If the tapping proceeds, a second alarm is triggered and the tapping will be aborted. 

The system is based on vision technology for thermal cameras where a continuous feed of the thermal image stream is processed by the LadleFill analysis algorithms. The output from the image analysis is presented to the operator and automatically interpreted to keep track of the metal level in the ladle.

Overfilling of ladles is occasionally occurring in different locations of metals production. In integrated steelmaking, tapping the torpedo cars into ladles is a process where overfilling occurs from time to time due to the discrepancy in volume between the two vessels in combination with severe smoke and dust generation. Any metal spillage on ladle cars and similar is likely to cause damage and loss of production.