Posted to News on 4th Nov 2026, 11:00
ABB to supply integrated automation and digital technologies for cold rolling expansion
ABB has secured two orders from Southwest Aluminum, a producer of high-performance aluminium products headquartered in Chongqing, China, to provide integrated automation, process control and digital solutions for separate cold rolling mills. The projects form part of Southwest Aluminum's expansion and upgrade of its wide-strip aluminium production capabilities.
ABB will supply technology for two six-high cold rolling mills: a 2,500 mm two-stand mill and a 3,000 mm single-stand mill. The scope combines mill automation and process control via ABB Ability System 800xA distributed control system (DCS), as well as drives, flatness control, sensing and measurement technologies with digital capabilities designed to provide greater visibility into production performance and equipment condition.
Central to the two projects is the use of common control system standards. By standardising the underlying automation architecture, ABB will help provide a more consistent operating environment while improving compatibility between systems. This will also simplify future maintenance and spare-parts management.
ABB will deploy ABB Ability Smart Manufacturing Solution for Cold Rolling Mill, a digital platform that integrates production, quality and equipment data, on both mills. The solution will give operators and maintenance teams a more detailed view of mill performance and support decisions on process settings, product quality and equipment condition.
ABB Ability History, ABB's industrial time-series data management platform, will collect and store high-frequency process information for analysis and business intelligence. This data will support monitoring of key rolling parameters, including thickness deviation and flatness, while ABB's Golden Coil analysis methodology will identify and replicate the best practices related to quality, productivity, yield and energy consumption for continuous performance optimisation.
By identifying relationships between process settings and production outcomes, such mill-wide analysis can support more systematic optimisation of operating parameters and help teams address production bottlenecks.
"The two projects build on the experience ABB and Southwest Aluminum have developed together over many years," said Frederik Esterhuizen, Global Business Line Manager, Metals & Power Conversion, ABB's Process Industries division. "Cold rolling places demanding requirements on process stability, control accuracy and equipment availability. Applying a common automation architecture across the two mills, together with deeper analysis of process and equipment data, will give Southwest Aluminum a strong foundation for optimising performance throughout the operating life of the lines."
ABB Ability Smart Manufacturing Solution for Cold Rolling Mill will also integrate condition monitoring, drive performance analysis and hydraulic diagnostics. Bringing these capabilities into a common environment will support earlier fault identification, predictive maintenance and assessment of equipment condition, helping maintenance teams plan interventions with greater visibility.
ABB and Southwest Aluminum have worked together since 1988. The latest projects extend the relationship into a new phase of automation and digitalisation for the customer's cold rolling operations. The mills are expected to be fully commissioned and operational by the end of 2027.
