Integrated steel plant strategic planning – an extension of coke production modelling in the m.simtop process integration platform

Abstract

Iron and steel making requires a wide range of different raw materials significantly influencing process performance, which demands a continuous optimization of process routes with respect to energy efficiency and emissions to the environment. Steadily changing raw material prices and qualities, market situations and product variations are challenging integrated steel plant operators in production planning and cost optimization. Primetals decided to develop a comprehensive metallurgical flow sheet model library to simulate and optimize integrated steel plants. Intensive development efforts were undertaken to migrate existing well-established calculation and engineering routines and integrate newly developed models. The generated model library enables the setup of mass and energy balances for integrated steel plants, development and evaluation of new process concepts as well as investigations on impacts of raw material changes and trace material distributions. Based on a comprehensive literature study, the operation data of a recent coking plant from a European coke producer was evaluated. Results from this preliminary work are used to develop predictive models for main elements, CRI, CSR, I10 and I40. In a new approach the models were incorporated into a global mathematical optimization routine for strategic operations planning of integrated steel plants. Insight will be given to the regression results and the models influence on overall operation optimization.