For a major Australian steel manufacturer, Mobile Automation carried out the electrical upgrade of the prime and finish coater rooms on the CPL2 coating line — a classified hazardous area, on a line that had to keep producing.
Keeping the classified area intact
In a coater room the work is not pulling cable, it is keeping circuits apart and the classification real.
- Power, data and intrinsically safe circuits run in divided cable tray throughout
- Every wall penetration sealed with Roxtec transit modules
- Cables crossing the coater run in flexible conduit inside steel, clamped to brackets drilled and tapped into the coater head
- Top-roll tower lights taken off the intrinsically safe terminal strip in the prime operator panel
- Those circuits re-routed through barrier glands into the panel's non-Ex compartment and terminated in an IP66 enclosure
Wiring completed before the shutdown
Panel work was brought forward so shutdown time was spent installing rather than wiring.
- Servo drive and remote I/O panels set up temporarily in the motor room beside the coater on a temporary supply
- Drive and encoder wiring completed and checked before the panels went to their final positions
- Switchboard frames modified on site, legs cut and base plates trimmed, so two boards sit hard against each other
- Most of the installation run on night shift, under permit, behind a toolbox talk each morning
Cabling, earthing and interlocks in both rooms
Each new cabinet was cabled, terminated and brought into service.
- PROFINET, motor, encoder and load-cell cabling run to every new cabinet
- Fortress interlocks and solenoids installed on shielded cable
- Pneumatics panels rewired and the hydraulic pack panel commissioned
- Earthing run from the coater-room earth bar to every motor in both rooms
- Emergency stops added and relocated in the operator panels
The results
- Prime and finish coater rooms upgraded with the coating line still producing
- The intrinsically safe terminal strip carrying intrinsically safe circuits only
- Every panel QA checked individually — bottom roll applicator, operator, marshalling, servo drive and control
- Installation presented for formal Ex inspection