Smart Manufacturing in Steelmaking
This playbook provides an overview of a business and technical solution for smart manufacturing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to optimize refractory usage and expose operational data to develop a predictive maintenance system and improve on-site customer warehouse management.
About Refractories in Steelmaking
Refractories are crucial consumables within the normal steel production process which provide heat, chemical, and mechanical resistance in furnaces. Refractories are consumed at approximately 10-15 Kg per ton of steel and represent about 3% of cost of goods sold (COGS) in steel manufacturing.
Refractories have mostly equally distributed wall thickness, but may be zoned such that a given segment of lining is assigned a lower quality, whereas refractories of greater wear resistance and generally of higher costs are reserved for those segments of the furnace that are subject to the most severe wear. While lining designs optimize performance and costs, the effects of operating variables on lining wear are important to know. Since wear does not occur uniformly, maintenance practices (for example, gunning and coating) are used to extend lining life.
The essential goal for refractories is to obtain a useful lining life that will provide maximum furnace availability for steel manufacturers to meet production requirements at the lowest possible refractories cost per ton of steel produced. Furthermore, refractories allow steel producers to extend their production campaigns in order to maximize their output. To this end, steel operators and refractories engineers seek to optimize their refractory lining designs, maintenance practices, and control of operating practices that are known to affect lining life.