Global assessment of biomass suitability for ironmaking — opportunities for co-location of sustainable biomass, iron and steel production and supportive policies

Iron and steel production processes are amongst the biggest industrial contributors to the global carbon emissions, and national as well as international obligations are set to drive their significant emission reductions. One of the possible strategies is to partially substitute fossil fuels used during the iron ore reduction process by sustainably-sourced biomass. The extent of the opportunities for such fuel switching, however, varies for each country. Theoretically, biomass into ironmaking should be only supported for countries which present co-location of sustainably domestically sourced biomass in sufficient quantity, a substantial iron and steel industry and supportive national policies. Using a multi-criteria global suitability assessment approach developed in this research, the status of countries’ steel industry, sustainable biomass resources and supportive policies were examined for top 40 steel production countries via the blast furnace ironmaking route. The results highlight those countries with significant potential to use domestically sourced biomass for such application and advance the efficient use of the limited biomass resources from the global perspective. Specifically countries such as Canada, Sweden, China, USA and France were identified as the most suitable, but other countries present opportunities that could be overcome if the corresponding barriers are identified

A guided analytics tool for feature selection in steel manufacturing with an application to blast furnace top gas efficiency

In knowledge intensive industries such as steel manufacturing, application of data analytics to optimise process performance, requires effective knowledge transfer between domain experts and data scientists. This is often an inefficient path to follow, requiring much iteration whilst being suboptimal with regard to organisational knowledge capture for the long term. With the ‘initial Guided Analytics for parameter Testing and controlband Extraction (iGATE)’ tool we created a feature selection framework that finds influential process parameters and their optimal control bands and which can easily be made available to process operators in the form of guided analytics tool, while allowing them to modify the analysis according to their expertise. The method is embedded in a work flow whereby the extracted parameters and control bands are verified by the domain expert and a report of the analysis is automatically generated. The approach allows us to combine the power of suitable statistical analysis with process-expertise, whilst dramatically reducing the time needed for conducting the feature selection. We regard this application as a stepping stone to gain user confidence in advance of introduction of more autonomous analytics approaches. We present the statistical foundations of iGATE and illustrate its effectiveness in the form of a case study of Tata Steel blast furnace data. We have made the iGATE core functionality freely available in the igate package for the R programming language

Challenges and Prospects of Steelmaking Towards the Year 2050

The world steel industry is strongly based on coal/coke in ironmaking, resulting in huge carbon dioxide emissions corresponding to approximately 7% of the total anthropogenic CO2 emissions. As the world is experiencing a period of imminent threat owing to climate change, the steel industry is also facing a tremendous challenge in next decades. This themed issue makes a survey on the current situation of steel production, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions, as well as cross-sections of the potential methods to decrease CO2 emissions in current processes via improved energy and materials efficiency, increasing recycling, utilizing alternative energy sources, and adopting CO2 capture and storage. The current state, problems and plans in the two biggest steel producing countries, China and India are introduced. Generally contemplating, incremental improvements in current processes play a key role in rapid mitigation of specific emissions, but finally they are insufficient when striving for carbon neutral production in the long run. Then hydrogen and electrification are the apparent solutions also to iron and steel production. The book gives a holistic overview of the current situation and challenges, and an inclusive compilation of the potential technologies and solutions for the global CO2 emissions problem

Reduction of Chromite ore at different flow rates of inert gas

Pre-reduction of chromite outside the submerged-arc furnace(SAF) can significantly lower the specific power consumption in the SAF process. Conventional processes for the pre-reduction of the ore operate at relatively high temperatures, at 1400-1500°C. It is possible to enhance the rate of reduction at low temperatures by optimizing the flow rate of inert gas over the reaction site. The influence of the flow rate of inert gas on the rate of reduction of chromite ore was investigated. The rate of reduction initially decreased wit the flow rate of the gas. It increased subsequently at higher flow rates to be followed by a decrease again. There was an optimum flow rate at which maximum reduction could be obtained. It was possible to achieve high levels of reduction at 1200°C by optimising the flow rate of the gas. The degree of reduction obtained was comparable to that obtained at 1400-1500°C, by conventional process routes