Sorry for delay of this post.. as explained in the last post it was due to non functional Broadband at our place.. During site work at Salem we became friends with many engineers of Salem Steel Plants many of whom were Tamils. Tamil are nice friendly people always eager to help. One of such engineer was Bharatan. He was a mechanical engineer with Salem Steel and was a quite person, he was staying in Salem Town and he will some time travel with us is our Car or Taxi. Any mismatch in coupling finsh boring or any other problem we shall face in execution of 2 Hi mill, he will be there to help. In electrical we had one gentleman called Anil Kumar a Malyali. He was a jolly fellow and we could go along well. Our Taxi operator was one Mr Goutaman, BA, -- we learned that educational achievements were added as part of name by some people in this part of Tamilnadu. He was nice person giving brand new cars as Taxi. Once her gave us a brand new big car from Ambassador family. This was centre of...

I promised you that I shall put up next blog on  8th Dec, but my hard luck.. broadband in USA was fast and working, having returned to India, I am struggling with the system of Government Owned BSNL to get my Broadband working... so many task in India you can do over phone.. but when in comes to phones you have to run, go, worship and many other things to get your phone going despite paying the excess billed amounts... God how we can achieve the growth in Steel or other sectors of economy? Forgive me my next blog is going to be delayed further...

Pulpit of  5 Stand Tandem Cold Mill at Bokaro Steel Plant - India (Ordered on MECON in 1977) Stainless Steel Plant at Salem : Though I have included a picture of 5 Stand TCM at Bokaro as part of 4 MT expansion of the SAIL plant, as promised in my yesterday's blog here I am with story related to Salem Plant of SAIL. Location and configuration of Salem Plant was more affected by political consideration than technical or commercial. Here I have no intention of offending any body or any region, and I apologize in advance if I hurt any body's feelings due to this observation. Salem plant engineers always showed us a near by hill by the name of Kanjmalai supposedly rich in Iron Ore as a reason for the plant location, however till now no mining from this hill have been attempted. In fact the plant was originally established as rolling mill complex having cold mills and lines leading to such observations. The plant was initially getting hot coils rolled in other units from raw ma...

2 Hi 1500 wide, Skin Pass Mill, Salem Steel Plant, India by MECON Ltd with Hydraulic Force cylinders (1980) I like to share few personal AGC experiences encountered during 38 years in the field of rolling mill automation and controls. First one being Hot Strip Mills of Bokaro   in India commissioned in 1975. I was one of the electrical commissioning engineer mainly involved with 132 /11 kV main step down substations and 11 kV supply system and motors. 11 kV synchronous motors of up to 10 MW was commissioned by me and my friends for Roughing Mill area. These stands were not with any AGC system, however 7 stand finishing mills were equipped with electro mechanical AGC system commissioned later on .. till then mill was running on manual thickness controls.The AGC system used DC screw down motors fed from circulating current type thyristor converters (SCR) and main motors were DC motors fed from Mercury Arc rectifiers fed from Zig Zag connected double star transformers. ...