During the transformation and development of Shougang and the upgrading of its product structure, the production capacity of high-end plates and strips has been rapidly improved, and its core competitiveness is enhanced year by year. In this process, Guo Liwei, the technical director of the Process Control Technology Center of the Automation Institute of SBAI, makes contributions and is widely recognized by others. 

Guo Liwei, a 44-year-old graduate with a doctoral degree and a senior engineer, once successively won Shougang’s Technical Foregoer, Shougang’s Technical Expert, the first prize of Shougang’s Science and Technology Award, Shougang’s Model Communist, Shougang’s Model Worker and many other honors. As a rolling process technology and automation professional Guo Liwei takes advantage of intelligent manufacturing and new concepts and technologies of Industry 4.0, actively exploring, concentrating on research and practicing repeatedly for helping Shougang’s products seize the initiative in the increasingly fierce market competition.

Innovation: master the core technology

“Silicon Steel - Intelligent Process Control of Cold Rolling Big Data” is a special scientific research project about intelligent manufacturing of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Its core is “Shougang Qian’an Iron and Steel Company’s Silicon Steel - Cold Rolling Intelligent Plant Project”. Guo Liwei made a crucial contribution to the breakthrough of this scientific research project in 2017. In the R&D process of this project, on the basis of mastering the advanced technologies and concepts of intelligent manufacturing, Guo Liwei actively makes technical innovations and explores the applications of core intelligent methods such as big data, machine learning, and in-depth exploration in the production process of iron and steel process technology.

Combining rolling technology, computer technology and big data intelligent technology, he started from the data and fully utilized the massive technological data that reflected the actual production process in the production process of the modern production lines to realize the intelligent optimization of the mathematical model of process control system and key control parameters of technological process. 

Combining the construction of big data platform of silicon steel intelligent plant, Guo Liwei used multi-source data fusion, multi-dimensional information feature extraction, and data cleaning based on rolling processes to establish a thematic database that can meet the needs of multi-objective optimization and provide reliable process data with high-valued density.

The implementation of a series of technological innovations has improved the set accuracy of the model system of oriented silicon steel units of Shougang Co., Ltd, in which the rolling force deviation is less than 2.5%, which exceeds that of domestic and foreign counterparts. Through the intelligent optimization of shape control parameters, the flatness control accuracy is within 5I, and the control accuracy of lateral thickness difference is 7um. Through the process control optimization at the low-speed stage, the unqualified length of the end-to-end quality is controlled within 10m. The product percent of pass is greatly improved, and remarkable economic and social benefits are obtained.

 “The core technology of applied research in the rolling model system” mastered by Guo Liwei is of quite high promotional value. It can be used in the model system optimization and technical promotion of more than a dozen rolling production lines such as hot rolling, cold rolling and heavy medium plates of Shougang Co., Ltd., Cold Rolling Company and Jingtang Company.

Success: come from hard work and persistence

In common people’s eyes, Guo Liwei is a winner with honors, but it is hard to imagine how many sleepless nights he had, how many difficulties and challenges he faced and how many setbacks and hardships he went through behind these honors. He often encourages himself with “hard work and persistence”. He is very clear that only by assiduously studying professional knowledge and improving his professional skills can he have the ability to overcome difficulties, and only with a meticulous working attitude can he have the courage to challenge difficulties.

While focusing on improving the quality of Shougang’s silicon steel products, Guo Liwei also makes contribution to the high-end development of Shougang’s automobile plate products by virtue of his achievements in scientific researches.

In the R&D process of the “technology development of size control of high-precision automobile plate based on stable rolling” project, Guo Liwei does research into and puts the optimization of reduction system and tension system, roll diameter configuration, roll roughness management, lubrication system optimization, deviation warning and the like into practice to effectively improve the stability of the automotive sheet in the production process.

While improving the production efficiency, through the research on technologies such as rolling model self-adaption, thickness correction of rolling mill inlet and deformation resistance prediction of new steel, the deviation of model set accuracy is reduced from 7% to 3%, the hit rate of automobile plate flatness is increased from 98.78 % to 99.34%, and the thickness hit rate is increased from 97.38% to 98.5%.

With stable production process and continuous improvement of product quality, Shougang automobile plate has achieved full coverage of 800-MPa steel grades and successively been approved by well-known domestic and foreign automobile companies such as Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, GM, Fiat, Great Wall in terms of materials. Its scale of production is expanded continuously, and its market share is also increased continuously.

Guo Liwei's series of technological innovations in the process of combining intelligent manufacturing technology with steel rolling technology has been widely recognized by industry peers. While continuously improving his technical level, scientific research capabilities, and business capabilities, he also actively assumes the team construction, plays a role in teaching, helping and leading the project team and cultivates some outstanding scientific research and business backbones with corresponding level, who are able to independently complete related work tasks. “Guo Liwei – Shougang’s Intelligent Innovation Team for Rolling Process” was selected by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Beijing People’s Government as an outstanding scientific and technological innovation team and won the support of one million yuan in Beijing’s state-owned capital management budget.