9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

Automation in the hot storage yard is a difficult task in an interconnected environment where differently sized slabs with a wide range of follow-up destinations create a complex set of stacking rules. Slabs that are destined to move on to scarfing, trimming or warm holding need to be carefully arranged to stacks in order to avoid cracks or curved slabs. The constrained storage space and the requirement for efficiently using material handling equipment (cranes, trailers, vehicles) on the other hand further complicate these decisions. In this work the authors will present an optimization model that is applied to the hot scarfing yard at voestalpine Stahl Linz. Results of the model are compared with past data and a pilot is implemented in a part of the hot scarfing yard. Focus of the paper will be the partition of the decision process into smaller optimization problems and their integrated solution. To conclude the paper the different possibilities of postprocessing of voestalpine Stahl are presented and discussed. In this section the focus is on the newly build scarfing machine which has gone in operation end of 2014