TECNALIA, MSI and Sidenor create digital twin of process for steel plant

TECNALIA, Sidenor and MSI have been working together to implement plant monitoring and control in strategic industrial sectors, which have found that digitalisation of their processes optimises their operation.

Sectors such as steel, copper, petrochemical and water treatment plants need to improve product quality and reduce operating costs and their ecological footprint. Their work involves complex processes, so monitoring and control of the entire plant is essential in order to achieve a production process that is both financially and environmentally efficient.

In order to work on digitalisation, the paradigm of decomposition, coordination and optimisation of plant operations was used, achieving monitoring and control.

In the case of steel, the three companies have been working to develop a digital twin of Sidenor’s iron and steel process, with the aim of reducing the number of surface defects and subprocesses on microalloyed steel end product. This ensures good performance of manufacturing processes (reduce defects) secondary metallurgy, continuous casting and hot rolling.

Milestones

One of the highlights of the project was the creation of online monitoring and alarm tools for secondary metallurgy and continuous casting processes. Optimisation tools were also developed with the aim of finding optimal values for the parameters that affect the processes of secondary metallurgy, continuous casting and hot rolling. Good performance was achieved in each subprocess and the number of defects in the end product was reduced. End product rejection rates can be reduced even further in continuous casting, as well as conditioning rates.

Further information

The European COCOP project, which was carried out in collaboration with partners from six EU countries, ended recently. This project was part of the H2020 programme.