Speaker
Description
The complexity of a steel plant’s operations can be daunting, as all production steps are partially interdependent and impossible to isolate. Therefore, ever changing markets and product demands make it a challenging endeavor to keep the production at highest efficiency, while staying competitive and complying with current environmental CO2 regulations.
Because of this demanding situation it is challenging to decide about investments, since every intervention into proven and established process routes by equipment modifications involves the risk of temporary production loss.
Hybrid steelmaking setups have recently become more and more attractive, as they enable the side-by-side operation of electric arc furnaces and basic oxygen furnaces. This approach allows for a gradual transition of the crude steel production from blast-furnace/BOF- to EAF-steelmaking with a lower CO2 footprint, while producing the same quantity of products.
Primetals Technologies uses dedicated simulation tools to model and simulate multiple customer plant-setups. By evaluating such digital plant-models that address the prospective plant-setup, ladle logistics, desired product mix and casting schedules, it becomes possible to make sound investment decisions based on digital plant-models instead of opinions. In general, the simulation models confirm expert opinions but often reveal additional issues across process boundaries, which are difficult to identify.
This paper summarizes the activities and outcomes of different customer studies, in which digital plant-models of the plant-setups have been used to figure out potential issues regarding logistics, layout and production scheduling for implementation of EAF steelmaking in an existing integrated BF/BOF steel plant or the general optimization of plant operations. The customer’s focus in the most cases is keeping the production up over the whole period of this transformation process and enabling further extensibility of EAF production as well as to increase plant capacity.