Mastering Operational Challenges in the Iron and Steel Industries by First-Principles Process Simulation with Hybrid Models

Abstract During the last decades, significant challenges for steel plant operators have emerged, embracing decreasing raw material qualities, increasing demands in product quality and variety, stricter environmental regulations, as well as supply-chain transformations. Consequently, new operational philosophies as well as adapted production routes are required, being different from those of state-of-the-art iron- and steel-making. To enable these new developments, the authors employed process simulation and developed a holistic metallurgical model library covering a wide range of iron- and steel-making aggregates. This simulation environment based on first-principles modeling provides all necessary thermodynamic properties and enables the flexible setup of any type of metallurgical process route. In this work, an overview of the setup of this simulation platform is presented, together with results addressing selected challenges such as strategic operational planning, problematic trace material distributions, and process development, in relation to the growing use of artificial intelligence.