Model-based optimisation for efficient use of resources and energy

Project Information

Morse

Grant agreement ID: 768652

DOI

10.3030/768652

Project closed

EC signature date 29 June 2017

Start date 1 October 2017

End date 28 February 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Advanced manufacturing and processing

Total cost

€ 5 791 410,00

EU contribution

€ 4 700 692,50

Coordinated by

TEKNOLOGIAN TUTKIMUSKESKUS VTT OY
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Morse (Model-based optimisation for efficient use of resources and energy)

Reporting period: 2020-10-01 to 2022-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Steel industry is facing the challenge of raising costs in energy and raw materials and demands for more sustainable production enforced with tightening regulations. MORSE project (Model-based Optimisation for efficient use of ResourceS and Energy) addresses these challenges searching for a more efficient production of high quality steel products in terms of energy and raw materials while addressing environmental impacts (decreasing number of rejections and subsequently solid waste) and reducing CO2 emissions.

The Morse project improves the products, business operations and competitiveness, as well as the energy and raw material efficiency, of the European steel industry. The project brought together software houses, researchers and steel factories to jointly develop software tools that were integrated and used to reform, accelerate and manage heavy production processes.

Morse’s main objective was to develop more advanced tools to improve steel quality and the management of complex processes. New ways of managing the entire production chain, lowering the consumption of energy and raw materials in particular, and reducing yield losses was sought for the industry. A special development target was model-based software tools, which were tested in close cooperation with various steel mills in Europe producing high-strength carbon steels, stainless steels and cast steels. Evaluation of 15 versatile use cases in three different pilot factories showed the potential of model-based software tools in terms of energy consumption, CO2 emissions and production costs.

European steel industry is continuously looking for new ways to improve sustainability and providing more value to society. Steel also forms part of a number of industrial value chains and is closely linked to many downstream industrial sectors such as automotive, construction, electronics, mechanical and electrical engineering. As a core of many European manufacturing value chains improving the sustainability and competitiveness is a vital for the European economy and employment.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Efforts on the first period focused on defining the requirements for Morse tools including models and software, and furthermore identifying the bottlenecks in processes and defining the use cases with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for industrial demonstrations. 15 use cases were defined in different steel sectors in order to demonstrate the benefits of Morse tools. In addition to specification work, the first period resulted the release of initial and modified process models, which were used within applications for unit process monitoring and control as well as part of the plant-wide process simulation and optimisation.

During the second and third period, the implementation and development work was carried out to integrate the developed models and optimisation solutions to unit and through-process applications. After initial versions of the solutions were demonstrated and tested off-line in controlled environments, they were improved and adopted for online use. Validation of the tools was done during the third period parallel with development work to provide results and experiences from the actual industrial environment use.

Results from the Morse project are software tools for unit and through process monitoring, optimisation and control that are aiming for improved process efficiency. Developed solutions for the unit processes include static energy and mass balance models, and dynamic process models for Electric Arc Furnaces (EAF), Argon Oxygen Decarburization (AOD), Blast Furnaces (BF), Basic Oxygen Furnaces (BOF), Composition Adjustment by Sealed argon bubbling – Oxygen Blowing (CAS-OB) and statistical models for slab management. On-line Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) was utilized in some cases for implementing the applications. Through process applications targeted for overall coordination of production included four main tools. Production management system for melt shop production with functions related to data and material management, Operator Support System utilising Reinforced Learning (RL) to assess human operators in process control, Plant-wide cost-optimisation system for offline analysis of total costs of production process including all relevant material and energy flows, and online Quality Monitoring Tool for managing the product and process quality along different process steps.

To prepare cross-sectorial exploitation of Morse results, communication and dissemination activities have been running continuously in order to promote the exchange of information between the project and the related community. Exploitation plans have been updated throughout the project and finally the Key Results (KR) and Key Exploitable Results (KER) were documented with related business models and plans. During the implementation of the project, totally 23 Key Results and six Key Exploitable Results with different exploitation nature and IPR strategy were defined.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The ambition of the Morse project was to develop a holistic, overarching system for process industries, providing methodologies and means for offline analysis of plant-wide material and energy flows as well as real-time through-process coordination, optimisation and control of production processes in an integrated way. This was achieved by modifying and qualifying individual process models for use in overarching control and optimisation and by developing optimisation methods and algorithms for unit process control as well as plant wide coordination and management.

The overall evaluation of results compared to set objectives targets showed that improvements related to energy consumption, raw material usage, CO2 emissions, and different process and quality figures were overall achieved. During the testing period, the developed Morse tools led to significant savings in terms of energy consumption and CO2 emissions, although the evaluation in some cases were rather difficult due to changes in processes. Considering the large number of use cases, the results show that the developed tools have good potential for improving the process efficiency. After further and wider adoption of the tools, the impacts for lowering the consumption of energy and raw materials, and reducing yield losses will further increase and become possible in wider scale and other industries.

Main Morse output results, in terms of steelmaking products, are strongly connected with increasing efficiency in the use of raw materials and energy, the reduction of CO2 emissions and increasing quality of the products. The specific KPIs established within the Morse project objectives are aligned with the EU strategy to increase competitiveness of EU industry and more specifically the steel industry. At the same time, Morse project developments in plant-wide optimisation tools, the use of nonlinear model predictive control applications and Operator Support Systems integrated with “Digital Twins” are already consistent with the EU strategies related to digitisation of EU Industry and the use of artificial Intelligence. It is clear that the potential of the Morse results both in terms of efficient steel production and the developed technologies related with the digitisation of the industry is huge and it can be extended not only to other areas, processes or units in steel making but also to a lot of other manufacturing and process industries in EU.

Morse project logo

Morse objective is to improve trough process optimisation in steel industry