Severstal Develops Digital Solutions for Modeling Production of New Products

The employees of the Severstal Russian Steel division, a Metal-Expo regular exhibitor, together with Severstal-Infocom create an automated system for modeling the production of materials, which will accelerate the development of new types of products. At the end of April, experts released the first test release of the program based on the mathematical model of the 2000 mill. The Directorate for Technical Development and Quality of the Severstal Russian Steel division uses mathematical models of metallurgical production for individual workshops, which allow calculating microstructure parameters and mechanical properties of metal.

Now in the development of new types of products, a direct calculation scheme is used: as input parameters, specialists use data on the chemical composition of steel and technological indicators of production conditions. Their experts are selected manually on the basis of their own experience, knowledge, literature, recommendations of colleagues. The result is data on the mechanical properties of the product at the outlet. Moreover, if the required values could not be obtained, the process has to be repeated, sometimes many times. The selection of the optimal chemical composition and production technology remains unresolved.

To optimize the time for the development of NVP, a change of approach is required in which the goal of the technologists is not the mechanical properties of the metal, but the chemical composition and technological parameters of production that will allow them to be achieved. To this end, specialists from the Severstal-Infocom management of new DTRK products and technologies and the Severstal-Infocom new technology development department are developing a new modeling system that operates according to the so-called “reverse” scheme. Experts implemented the pilot release of the program on the basis of a mathematical model of the mill 2000 of sheet rolling shop No. 2 of CherMK. As input parameters, the system allows you to use the properties of metal. The result of the calculations will be options for chemical compositions and production parameters. The implementation of this idea will allow several times to reduce the time for the development of NVP, as well as to optimize the production technology of existing products without compromising the required properties and in accordance with the required GOSTs.

The first pilot model on the example of one workshop will be checked in the work by the staff responsible for the development of the NVP, and specialists in the direction of unification of chemical compositions, who will apply the solution to consider the possibilities of using excess suitable metal in the production of new orders received. The next steps will be optimization and acceleration of the program, as well as its scaling to other units with the subsequent integration into a single modeling system.