Speaker
Description
A part of the digitalisation efforts in the steel industry concerns the numerical optimisation of the steel production chain to increase quality, productivity, and sustainable production. We present the computational modelling of the steel processing route at Štore-Steel, comprising continuous casting, controlled cooling, annealing, reheating, reverse and continuous hot rolling, cooling bed, and heat treatment. The modelling concept is based on the Hybrid Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) approach, composed of a combination of Horizontal ICME, where the simulation codes for different processing or product usage steps are connected with their associated multiscale structures and material properties, and Vertical ICME, where the simulation codes at multiple length scales are involved in describing the product properties. The scales we cope with range from the grain size to several tenths of a meter. We present novel solution methods for describing the related multiscale and multiphysics thermomechanical problems. The microstructure is formulated using the phase-field method, the mesostructure using the cellular automaton method, and the macroscopic electromagnetic, fluid mechanics, and solid mechanics fields using continuum mechanics concepts. We elaborate on a space-time adaptive meshless solution based on collocation with radial basis functions for solving the microscopic and macroscopic scales and the point automata concept for solving the mesoscopic scale. The phenomena addressed by this novel meshless technique range from large-eddy simulation of continuous casting to elastoplastic deformation of products on the cooling bed. The validation of the models, based on plant and laboratory measurements, is shown. A coupling of physical models with artificial intelligence for optimisation of quality, energy, and productivity is presented.