Steel Mill Larry Car Equipped with Duff-Norton SuperCylinder

THE CHALLENGE
A steel mill with a two-vessel BOF (basic oxygen furnace) had an extremely labor-intensive production process. This included loading alloy batch materials into hand trolleys that were manually weighed, and then the materials were hand dumped into the BOF vessel. The Basic Oxygen Furnace process brings the initial alloy batch materials to the desired concentration and removes impurities to fit product specifications. Due to the manual operation, the production of the alloy batch materials was limited in size, and output capacity was hampered.

THE SOLUTION
To increase speed and efficiency, our customer adapted an automated Larry Car containing an onboard weighing system and a hopper to capture alloy materials from eight overhead alloy material storage bins. In this configuration, the Larry Car travels between the two BOFs on
rails. It unloads the alloy materials directly into the BOF by opening and closing the hopper dump gate. Duff-Norton’s SuperCylinder RO530-B47-015 powers the dump gate motion.

OUR ADVANTAGES
Key advantages in this project include the heavy-duty capacity of the SuperCylinder and increased production speed combined in a self-contained actuator package.

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