Page 26 - ITA Journal 3-2018

Technical Papers
GIFA, METEC, THERMPROCESS, NEWCAST 2019
Casting and steel – The future is digital
Digital transformation and industry 4.0 are among the major topics of the future, also in the metallurgy industries. More and more sophisticated sensor technology provides more and more data from the production process.
purchasing, sales, production and logistics in a cost-saving manner with hardware-based IT applica- tion of Industry 4.0. The devel- opment of digital channels puts the customer at the heart of the business.
For Essen-based steel and indus- trial group ThyssenKrupp, the interlinked steel factory with a digital channel to the customer has already been achieved. The Industry 4.0 hot rolling mill Hoesch Hohenlimburg in Hagen is interlinked with the precur- sor material supplier Hüttenw- erke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM) in Duisburg. The steel slabs are cast in Duisburg, then rolled in Hagen into medium-wide strip, which is then processed by sheet metal processors into components for the automotive industry. Even during the process, customers can use a PC, smartphone or tablet PC to determine when his steel strip goes into production and make changes to material properties such as sheet thickness and width at short notice.
Casters in the data stream
Generating process knowledge from data with the support of Big Data and implementing solu- tions in Industry 4.0 is also on the agenda of aluminium and iron casters. Solutions such as process optimisation through coupling of the casting process simula- tion with data-driven process models are in demand – a research ap-proach that Magma of Aachen, a company specialising in sim- ulation software, is pursuing in the IProguss research project. Intelligent energy and resource
First-hand experience of the digital future no longer requires a visit to Silicon Valley. More and more companies are realising that within the quartet of tech- nology trade fairs GIFA, METEC, THERMPROCESS and NEWCAST new and exciting topics are being addressed! “The Bright World of Metals” is focusing on digitalisa- tion and Industry 4.0 in 2019.
Digital transformation and Industry 4.0 are among the major topics of the future in the metallurgy indus- tries. Increasingly sophisticated sensor technology is providing more and more data from the pro- duction process in foundries and steel mills. Every cast slab and every rolled steel strip requires thousands ofitemsofdata.Evenacomparatively smaller steel mill like Saarstahl’s at the Völklingen site produces more than 100 terabytes of process data a year with around two and a half million tons of steel products – a data volume corresponding to the contentsofaround30milliontele- phone directories.
It is no longer simply the accuracy of the data that is the basis for information but the sheer volume as well. Evaluating data, recog- nising patterns and obtaining information is no longer possible with conventional IT methods. As big data analysis, arti cial intelligence and networked cloud systems are replacing the data centres and relational databases of the past, the digital monitoring of machines and systems reduces maintenance costs, increases ef - ciency and has the potential to optimise products. Cloud technol- ogies, with their storage volumes that are subject to hardly any limits, can serve to make it possi- ble to generate more revenue from operational product and machine data with new services.
Metallurgical plant manufacturers such as the SMS group hope that digital services will compensate them for the weakening of their core business due to worldwide overcapacities in steel. Steel manufacturers and foundries link
ITAtube Journal No3/October 2018
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