FEATURE | STEEL CRANES
STEEL YOURSELF
Technology may be taking over steel production, but physical lifting in tough conditions still needs to be done. Julian Champkin reports.
precise, more efficient, through digitally- improved control systems. The whole process is complex, from inputs of scrap metal in varying compositions to exacting furnace temperatures and timings, admixtures of ores, scrap and additives in varying ratios,
T
hings are changing in steel production. Green steel is becoming a reality. Electric furnaces are becoming more
cooling rates, rolling speeds… And all of that takes place after the mining and refining of the ores. Steel production needs reams of data, interacting in hugely complex ways, to produce end products of various different properties of hardness, ductility, corrosion- resistance and the rest. Consequently, it is ripe for Artificial Intelligence – which is indeed entering the process. New mills and furnaces are embracing A.I., with good reason.
A steel mill in Finland, with hoists. (Credit: Peyton Chung, Wikimedia)
Italian company Danieli, perhaps the
worlds manufacturer of equipment for steel making, is involved in dozens of new projects worldwide; it supplies furnaces, shredders (for scrap metal), tundishes (the bucket-shaped containers full of molten metal that get carried around by overhead cranes) as well as feed cranes. It has a concept for steel production, which it calls ZHA, ‘Zero Humans Around’. Given the heat and dust of foundries, and
the continuous presence overhead of huge buckets of red-hot molten metal, having no people in the vicinity is clearly desirable. But there is more to it than that. “The use of AI technologies brings
us to the development of a new level of automation for both production and business processes,” says Danieli. “It steers us towards what was recently described as ‘hyperautomation’. Hyperautomation (or Intelligent Automation) means automating all the processes that can be automated within an organization applying the right priority and the integrated tools capable of covering the need for digitization in its entirety.
“This is already a technological reality
in many steelmaking plants,” it says, “even if only as pilot projects and experiments.” Advancing AI from experimentation to generating practical sustainable results is, it says, the next challenge. “AI’s growing capabilities – connected with advanced automation and applied to production process and flexible and efficient machines – gives us the opportunity to push the limits of the concepts of autonomous plants and zero-humans-around.” The goal is to have plants that satisfy
quality requirements with lower operating costs in raw materials, consumables or
22 | June 2024 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
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