9th International Conference on Modeling and Simulation of Metallurgical Processes in Steelmaking - STEELSIM2021

As one of the largest production chains in the world, the steel industry faces an ever-increasing demand for higher level of functionality and quality of final products at reduced environmental impact and manufacturing cost. The steel industry has developed an extensive range of sensors to generate data, monitor, and control steelmaking processes. Despite these advances, issues remain in the...

The impact on process performance after changing parameters like burner mass fluxes, dwell time, or gas composition is vital knowledge. It can be obtained by various methods as for example experimental setups, or computational fluids dynamic (CFD) simulation. The disadvantage of those conventional methods is that they are time-consuming and expensive for full-size industrial applications....

In the last decades, steelmaking processes have been a subject to substantial modernization in terms of digitalization and informatization of various plants. Whether in the past operational measurements acquired by SCADAs have been used solely for process monitoring and fault detection, a closer inspection of the gathered data reveals numerous possibilities also for process enhancement and...

Steel recycling in electric arc furnaces (EAFs) is crucial to achieve environmental as well as economic sustainability of the steel industry. Although the EAFs impose a smaller environmental imprint in comparison to basic oxygen furnaces (BOFs), they still represent an energy-intensive process, with numerous possibilities for improvements. Digitalization and informatization of the steelmaking...

The electric arc furnace (EAF) generates crude metal from virgin materials and recycled scrap.
Meeting the right concentrations of alloying elements in the crude metal (e.g., Cu, Ni) is crucial.
Scrap with higher uncertainty in the concentrations of such alloys is usually cheaper than virgin materials but might threaten product quality.
Using the cheapest input materials while complying...

State-of-the-art automation technology enables digitalization of the continuous casting process that goes far beyond conventional automation of industrial production. Primetals Technologies provides a digital twin that combines an intelligent digital representation of a casting machine as well as the casting process and the slabs, blooms or billets that are produced. It allows metallurgists...

The RH degassing plant is essential for producing ultra-clean steel, but its vacuum-based nature is hiding the process from close scrutiny. Despite recording the many inputs and outputs of process control and measurements surrounding the plant, the use of produced data is comparatively low, and data handling is a challenge, especially considering correlations of process control data with KPIs...

Iron and steel making requires a wide range of different raw materials significantly influencing process performance which demands a continuous optimisation of process routes also with respect to energy efficiency as well as environmental emissions. Steadily changing raw material prices and qualities, market situations and product variations are challenging integrated steel plant operators in...

Thermo-Calc Software is a well-known developer of large CALPHAD-type databases and software for property and phase diagram calculations based on Gibbs energy minimization. A database for oxides, TCOX, has been available since 1992 and development has been greatly accelerated in recenet years placing special emphasis on steel-slag interactions.
Parallel to the database, the Process Metallurgy...

In a blast furnace, hot pressurized air is forced into a packed coke bed where it combusts, generating hot reducing gases for liquid iron production. Stable operation of the furnace requires careful balancing of many operational conditions. Blast furnaces are very resource intensive, and any changes in operating conditions can take hours to produce results. Currently, operators generally rely...

Knowing the material properties seamlessly across the full product length is a prerequisite for enhanced product safety. Primetals Technology created a customizable IT solution based on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms which calculates the mechanical properties of a hot rolled or annealed or galvanized steel strip just in time and almost without additional equipment. ...

Configuring rules for automated quality evaluation within a quality management system is a complex task, especially when several processing lines along the production route are involved. In fact, the system user needs to transfer process and product knowledge of quality engineers and steel developers into the system in order to enable an automated quality decision that reflects the experts’...