Intelligent steel manufacturing

The finished products of the modern, and integrated, iron and steel industry are the result of an important succession of complex transformations of matter. Each step of the manufacturing process has an impact on the characteristics of the final product (e.g. mechanical properties, surface appearance, roughness, resilience).

In order to respect the stringent customer’s requirements (car manufacturing, home-appliances, building materials, packaging), one must master the complex relationships between the various parameters of the manufacturing process and the characteristics of the finished product to be delivered. The globalization and the market pressure push the steel makers to optimize the efficiency of the manufacturing assets and the return on investments.

PEPITe provides « intelligent manufacturing » solutions to help the metal industry in facing these challenges. PEPITe has developped innovative tools to extract valuable knowledge from the large volume of data collected by the monitoring of the steel making process.These relationships can be extracted, through Data Mining, from the historical database of the process. When sufficient precision is achieved, these model functions, linking key parameters, can be used to fine-tune the manufacturing process.

Thanks to its solutions PEPITe is able to detect critical parameters and complex interrealtionships that will help the steel maker to improve the plant efficiency. The ROI of these solutions is usually less than 12 months.Based on its generic data mining tools, PEPITe provides solutions that targets specific challenges faced in the day-to-day operation of a steel manfucaturing line:

• Smart Steel Mill Optimal Preset, increases the productivity of a steel mill by decreasing the off-spec products

• Accumulator Optimizer, optimize the speed control of the steel strip to maximize the productivity and accumulators efficiency

• Smart Coil Cooling Predictor, reduces the storing time by a better estimation of the cooling time so that the coil can be handled earlier

• Steam System Optimizer, optimize the combustion of blast furnaces and coke units to produce steam and electrical energy