DissTec

Initial situation

The evolution of secondary steelmaking processes and its introduction to the steelmaking plants brought about the effective production of high quality steel grades. Today’s importance of secondary steelmaking processes in Europe is also reflected in the research activities in this technological area. Within the framework of the ECSC and RFCS steel research programme, in the last 20 years around 50 projects with the focus on secondary metallurgy have been funded. The projects aimed at improving process performance in terms of resource consumption and liquid steel quality optimisation. Within these projects, numerous measurement technologies, process models and online control approaches were developed.

Because of the large variety of subjects, distributed along the different projects performed throughout the years and shared among many research and industrial partners, the situation today regarding the knowledge and results gained in these projects can be summarised as follows:

The impact of the results of the completed European projects on the industrial practice is much less than potentially achievable.
The various researches followed different, sometimes diverging development lines, with poor synergy and occasionally contradictory objectives.
Today there is no clear indication of the most useful future developments and consequently also the requirements for future research activities.

Work programme of the project

The following activities will be performed within the dissemination project:

Critical analysis and review of past ECSC and RFCS projects on Secondary Metallurgy technologies
Seminars with oral presentations of selected results on dedicated topics.
Webinars with demonstrations of successful applications in the field of measurement and automation technologies.
A workshop for information exchange and open discussion, especially with regard to identification of future developments and definition of a road map.

Below the schedule for the dissemination activities:

Objectives and expected results

The objective of the dissemination project is to valorise, distribute and promote the exploitation of the most important results of European research projects on Secondary Metallurgy Technology. Also a roadmap for future research activities and priorities shall be prepared and communicated. These general objectives can be broken down as follows:

To promote the dissemination of the gained knowledge and the introduced technological solutions in Secondary Metallurgy.
To identify most promising and most useful emerging development lines and to encourage the use of best results and innovative solutions in European steel plants.
To identify future developments and priorities for research activities, to produce a clear and realistic picture of the future trends to be expected in Secondary Metallurgy technology.
To provide a clear road map for the technological developments in this field.

Industrial benefits for the steelmaking plants are expected regarding:

The application of new measurement systems for liquid steel properties (temperature, composition and cleanness), allowing to control these quality relevant parameters within tighter ranges and thus to improve the overall quality of the final steel product.
The application of intelligent (e.g. model-based) process control, allowing to increase energy and material efficiency as well as to reduce the environmental impact.
Innovations to improve the quality and reuse of steelmaking by-products (e.g. slags) to enhance the saleability of these by-products for the entire sector.

Survey for Road Map definition

On 16th of November 2017 a final workshop “Road map for future secondary metallurgy technology” was held.

In this workshop, the most important evaluation results regarding the “State of the art in secondary metallurgy technology” to five main subjects were presented and discussed with experts from different fields like steel plants, and plant engineering.

As one result of the workshop a questionnaire was set up, to assess the importance of tendencies of the main subjects as evaluated during the DissTec project.

You can access and fill the questionnaire under the web site
https://disstec-survey-roadmap.bjorkvall.com/index.php/141199?lang=en

Together with a short introduction to the DissTec project, there are lists of relevant topics, in which you can directly select your scoring regarding the relevance of these topics. Furthermore, you may also add further topics to the list or add individual comments to each topic.
The questionnaire can be filled directly via the web site. It will take about 5-10 minutes. Your contribution will automatically be returned to the DissTec team in an anonymous way.
We would appreciate if you fill the questionnaire until the 31st of January 2018. The results will then be used to set up the Road Map, which will be made accessible to all interested persons via the project web site.
In advance, we like to thank you very much for your participation!

The DissTec team