HATFLAT

In flat steel production, flatness of steel strips and plates is of paramount significance for a safe and stable process operation and essentially defines final product quality. Although local flatness is controlled successfully during rolling, many steel plants face significant flatness problems for thin and/or high-strength steel products in downstream processes and after production. HatFlat investigates cross-process influences on the development of flatness defects. Using digital twins and the novel combination of classical first-principle models and machine learning methods, a holistic understanding is achieved, and most sensitive process parameters are identified. An assistance software will be developed, that supports operators to improve flatness.

The project work programme is developed to meet the main project idea: Generating practical knowledge and understanding about cross-process flatness behavior in steel plants by intelligently evaluating process data.

Regarding the consortium next are described the partners

VDEh-Betriebsforschungsinstitut GmbH (BFI) is the leading steel research facility for applied industrial research in Germany. The staff of BFI is approximately 100 people, over 70 % are scientists or engineers. It has performed more than 400 multi-national, multi-partner RTD projects within ECSC, RFCS and other EU programmes in the last 20 years. The main object of the institute’s work is the optimisation of complete steel production and maintenance processes under economic and quality aspects. Especially in the field of flatness measurement and control, BFI has long-lasting experience

In HatFlat BFI will focus on the analysis of cross-process flatness behaviour by applying machine learning algorithms and first-principle models on the strip rolling process chain. Another focus will be put on the development of a flatness assistance software.

Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe AG (tkSE) is a major European integrated steel maker, producing annually around 11.3 Mio.t of steel products with a turnover of 9.5 billion Euro and 27.000 employees. The production focusses on flat products of different steel grades. The main industries addressed are Automotive/Trucks, Construction, Mechanical/Plant Engineering, Energy, Special Vehicles, Packaging and Appliances. tkSE will provide relevant data from its hot strip mill for use case 1. The cooling section of hot strip mill 2 allows to produce fully-martensitic strip material directly after the finishing line. In combination with several measurement devices, all relevant process parameters and product properties are available to analyse the process. A flatness measurement after the finishing line can correlate flatness and rolling conditions.

The German plant Thyssenkrupp Hohenlimburg GmbH (SE-PR) in Hagen belongs to the thyssenkrupp Steel Europe business unit Precision Steel. The plant is specialised in customer-specific applications in which even small batch sizes can be produced economically. At SE-PR slabs are reheated, hot rolled to strips which are then cooled down, pickled and levelled. The hot strip produced by SE-PR has a high technical standard and is used as a starting material in the cold rolling industry and is also used in direct processing, mainly in the automotive supplier industry. SE-PR will, like tkSE, provide relevant data for use case 1 from its hot strip mill. This allows a comparison of two different types of hot strip mills in order to draw conclusions about the universality of the results and future transferability to other plants.

Rina Consulting – Centro Sviluppo Materiali S.p.A. (CSM SPA) is a fully private innovation center with extensive experiences in the development and application of innovative processes and materials. Today CSM SPA is part of RINA Group that is a global provider of classification, certification, testing, inspection and training services to assist clients in a wide range of business sectors as Marine, Energy, Transport & Infrastructures, Business Assurance, Environment and Innovation.

Marcegaglia Plates (MCP) is the Italian company of Marcegaglia group focused on heavy plates production with about 800.000 tons per year output. The production is concentrated in the dedicated unit of San Giorgio di Nogaro (UD) – an ISO 9001 certified plant – equipped with a 4-high Reversing Rolling Mill, dedicated to the production of steel plates for train final application, with a minimum thickness of 10 millimetres. In this project Marcegaglia Plates will be one of the industrial partners for the implementation and validation of the HatFlat assistant tool. Ing.

Fagor Arrasate S. Coop. (FAGOR) is a company specialized in designing, manufacturing and supplying sheet metal forming machine tools. FAGOR was created in 1957 and, since then, has expanded its products and business in an extraordinary significant manner, being now one of the world leaders in this field. It is one of the 5 biggest worldwide manufacturers in terms of turnover and the first one considering the product’s portfolio The company is a worldwide known supplier for Cut-to-Length, Slitting, Combi and multi-blanking lines as well as for processing lines as pickling lines, skin passes, reversible mills, painting, galvanizing or levelling lines. Due to its experience, FAGOR has extensive knowledge in all the variables involved during the processing of a coil, from uncoiler process to the cutting process. This knowledge will be used for flatness modelling in HatFlat. Implementation of additional measurement systems will also be done by FAGOR.

Koniker S. Coop. (KO) is the non-profit R&D business unit of FAGOR ARRASATE. KO currently has a staff of 30 experienced researchers (Advanced Engineers and Engineering Technicians in both the mechanical and electrical fields), working in cross-disciplinary teams with the technical departments of the different partner cooperatives. At this moment, KO has a strong team focused on the development of IoT Platforms and Industry 4.0 oriented applications and services. Among others, one of the main focusses of KO are the Data Analytics projects. KO has not only base knowledge on this subject, obtained through the participation on different projects, but also the domain-oriented knowledge, as an obvious consequence of working close to FAGOR.

RESEARCH FUND FOR COAL & STEEL

Project nº:101033991-HATFLAT

PROJECT FUNDED BY EUROPEAN COMMISION UNDER THE GRANT AGREEMENT  101033991 AND THE CALL RFCS-2020

HOLISTIC ASSISTANCE FOR CROSS-PROCESS ANALYSIS AND PREDICTION OF STRIP AND PLATE FLATNESS