Growth Opportunities Will Improve with Lowest Cost Liquid Steel

by Sara A. Hornby, Hideyuki Nishizawa

Publisher - Optimization Group, Tube City IMS, LLC, Asia, Tube City IMS, LLC

Category - General Novel

When assessing the cost of producing liquid steel, one needs to review not only the cost of various metallics inputs but also the potential for maximizing the efficient use of the available metallics through peripheral process variables. This paper will discuss how an unsurpassed database of metallics chemistry and scrap market knowledge, in combination with an intimate understanding of the steelmaking process and expertise in Six Sigma evaluation, creates the ability to achieve significant savings in the cost of producing liquid steel from rapid charge mix calculations and lower scrap grade use. The Scrap OptiMiser® System (SOS), a two part computer process model installed at select steel mill sites worldwide, can assist. The SOS has the ability to assist mills in forecasting the site, and heat, specific metallics requirements for the production of the least cost liquid steel. The SOS considers the order book, inventory (on-ground or in transit), anticipated home generated scrap, as well as the variable metallics pricing and the steelmaking process variables to provide scrap purchasing efficiencies and savings. Then, using metallics chemistries and criteria specified by the steel mill, the SOS (through its GenBlend+® component) creates metallics charge mixes, in real time, per heat, to satisfy chemistry criteria at a lower cost Use of the SOS consistently results in significant reductions and savings in the cost of producing liquid steel. Some examples of success stories for both the Integrated and mini-mill steelmakers will be discussed.

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