Aluminium smelter carbon bake furnace facility
Furnace Control

AutoFire

Anode Bakes Firing Control System

An energy-efficient firing control system for aluminium smelter carbon baking furnaces — designed for the harshest environment in the plant, and still doing its job decades on.

★ "Significant Engineering Achievement" — Institution of Engineers Australia, 1993
Track Record

Proven Across Alcoa, Worldwide

AutoFire began at Alcoa's Point Henry smelter and went on to run bake furnaces at Alcoa plants in Australia, Canada, the USA, Iceland, and Brazil. In the early 1990s an Alcoa US taskforce independently rated it the best firing control system globally for performance, technology, user acceptance, safety, and cost.

Today we provide ongoing software and hardware support for AutoFire at Portland Aluminium.

AutoFire furnace control in operation
  • ✓Retrofits existing furnaces — no wholesale equipment replacement
  • ✓Distributed control with graphic displays at the firing frames
  • ✓Web-based supervisory interface for plant-wide monitoring
  • ✓Fuel-efficient firing with exhaust opacity sensing for low emissions
  • ✓Runs on standard PLC hardware (Rockwell/Allen-Bradley, Siemens, Sixnet)