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Representatives from TMEIC enjoy a coffee
Jan Petko, general manager of process technology excellence for US Steel Kosice (USSK) based in Poland, focused on how the Internet of Things can improve plant safety. The Polish steelmaker has teamed up with IBM and defined a new set of five capabilities that, it claims, will lead to improved safety at blast furnace facilities. It has already implemented a number of safety regulations and procedures including: PPE and gas detectors; working in pairs; checkpoints (all personnel entering the blast furnace have to use a people locator system and specify visited areas); safety locks; walkie talkie; stationary man down alarm; and paper-based evidence. Blast Furnace number two at USSK has been selected for a pilot project following the development – by IBM and USSK – of five new capabilities designed to improve blast furnace safety and these are: worker location tracking, real time facility occupancy monitoring, safety tracking and real-time incident detection, a personal guard (USSK employees receive alerts in case of incidents), and safety insights (on hazard areas where incidents occur plus incident trends and frequency). Generating innovative ideas Kirill Sukovykh, NLMK-SAP Co-Innovation Lab Lead, discussed the aims and objectives of the Co-Innovation Lab, claiming that its mission was to drive generation and facilitate the implementation of innovative ideas to support development of new competitive capabilities at NLMK. He said that co-operation with other technology partners, such as metals and mining companies and universities, was crucial to the success of the Lab and that creating a platform for the development of a future vision for SAP metals and mining industry solutions was the end game. Liberty House Group’s (LHG) chief technology officer, Eric Vitse, said that Industry 4.0 has huge potential in terms of raw materials flexibility, mass customisation and delivery precision. He argued that modern computer hardware was an July/August 2018
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essential prerequisite and that process modelling capabilities in R&D needed to be strengthened alongside automation support for implementation. Vitse said that LHG would leverage the industrial approach of the UK and Australia and quoted Jeff Connelly, chair of the Australian Prime Minister’s Industry 4.0 Taskforce, who commented that ‘Australia should see the fourth industrial revolution as an opportunity’. Vitse said that Industry 4.0 fitted well with LHG’s Greensteel vision in terms of safer manufacturing through the use of
Professor Dirk Schaefer from the University of Liverpool in the UK presented a paper on the subject of open innovation and social product development, the subject of a panel discussion last year, and later took part in a discussion on engineering education and qualifying the Industry 4.0 workforce. Other distinguished panel members included Dr. Chenn Qian Zhou, founding director, Steel Manufacturing, Simulation and Visualisation Consortium, Purdue University Northwest, Indiana, USA. Dr Zhou also presented a paper on the subject of Simulation, Visualisation and Data Analytics for Smart Steel Manufacturing, and Dr. Joe Flynn, assistant professor in manufacturing engineering, University of Bath, not forgetting Dr. Richard Curry, director, operations, Materials Processing Institute. Social product development In his open innovation paper, Professor Schaefer cited pressure to keep innovating and a competitive global environment as two drivers behind the need to consider social product development. He spoke of
Primetals Technologies’ Kurt Herzog and Wolfgang Oberaigner in conversation
automation and robotics and that it offered a significant improvement in throughput and operational costs. He highlighted smart predictive maintenance and safety systems as ‘areas of opportunity’ for applying cyber-physical systems in existing plants and said that ‘modern data technologies’ would allow the company to access real time information efficiently and use data in process models and self-learning systems ‘to improve process adherence and product quality’. Day two started with a keynote from SMS group highlighting the challenges and opportunities faced by the company during the development of the world’s first so-called ‘learning mill’. US-based Frank Adjogble, chief engineer, process control and production planning for SMS, said that the Big River Steel facility in Osceola, Arkansas, USA, employs only 450 employees, but that they run the entire mill, which produces 1.5Mt/yr.
‘mass collaboration’ – large numbers of people working independently on a single project – and crowd sourcing (a process of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people). He said that crowd sourcing was a way of solving problems and producing things ‘by connecting online with people that you otherwise wouldn’t know’. There were many interesting presentations and nowhere near enough space to mention all of them here in what amounts to a brief snapshot of the event. Suffice it to say that the Future Steel Forum proved, yet again, to be a force to be reckoned with and something that Steel Times International will be taking forward. Next year there will be two Future Steel Forum conferences: the European event will take place in Budapest in September 2019 and we are planning an Asian event in November next year � www.steeltimesint.com
09/07/2018 12:33:01