2950 Fahrenheit - No Match for Pixim-Powered Cameras
Speco and Pixim solve steel mill's ultimate lighting challenge.
Rob Irwin had the ultimate challenge for a video camera-recording and monitoring a room that goes from dark to as bright as the sun in a matter of seconds. As melt shop electrical supervisor for Severstal, the fourth largest steelmaker in the United States, he needed to find a camera that could continuously monitor the mill's huge electric arc furnace (EAF).
A steel mill is a hazardous environment and risk to employees needs to be minimized as much as possible. The EAF poses a variety of potential dangers. An electrode is lowered into the furnace and an electric arc creates an intense heat which melts 
scrap metal into new molten steel. The furnace is lined with refractory material called fire brick. This special refractory brick lines a big, steel ladle that is used to place the scrap metal inside the EAF. The ladle's fire brick jacket has water pumping through it continuously. Workers monitor the refractory material 24 hours a day looking for cracks and other defects. Since steel melts at 2950 degrees F, any water that gets into the metal will superheat, and the whole furnace could explode like a bomb.
An explosion would result in critical downtime for the steel mill. Though Severstal has a backup EAF, it would take a week for the damaged furnace to cool down enough to be moved. Thousands of dollars a day would be lost. More critically, lives could be lost. This disastrous scenario happened in January 2010 at a steel mill in Indiana. The water in the EAF reached the molten steel, and the furnace exploded killing one worker and injuring four others.
In addition to observing the refractory material, the workers monitor the entire melt process. Is the electrode working correctly? Is the lid closing properly? Is the material melting as it should? To mitigate human error during monitoring, Rob needed a camera that could watch with an unblinking eye and accurately record events.
The numerous cameras Rob tried in the past could not handle the extreme lighting conditions. The images would bloom whenever the lid of the furnace would open, rendering the cameras useless. In desperation, he turned to his security distributor, Grainger, for help.
The representative from Grainger knew who to ask. He contacted Glenn Good, regional sales manager for Speco Technologies®. "Grainger arranged for Glenn to come on site, look at our set up, and determine if they had a camera that would work," explains Rob. "Glenn immediately recommended Speco's line of Pixim-powered cameras, and gave us a camera to test."
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