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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Morse (Model-based optimisation for efficient use of resources and energy)

Teaser

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) currently addresses these...

Summary

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) currently 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 will improve the products, business operations and competitiveness, as well as the energy and raw material efficiency, of the European steel industry. It brings together software houses, researchers and steel factories to jointly develop software tools that will be integrated and used to reform, accelerate and manage heavy production processes.

Morse’s main objective is 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 are being sought for the industry. A special development target is model-based software tools, which are being tested in close cooperation with various steel mills in Europe producing high-strength carbon steels, stainless steels and cast steels.

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

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. Morse also defined 15 use cases in different steel sectors in order to demonstrate the benefits of Morse tools. In addition to specification work, this period resulted the release of initial and modified process models which will be used within applications for unit process monitoring and control as well as part of the plant-wide process simulation and optimisation.

To prepare cross-sectorial exploitation of Morse results the plans for communication and dissemination activities were carried out as well as initial plans for result exploitation. The communication activities were running continuously as planned in order to promote the exchange of information between the project and the related community. Project websites were continuously updated as well as Twitter and LinkedIn channels. During this period, six internal and one public newsletter were prepared and distributed.

Final results

The ambition of the Morse project is 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 will be 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.

By far the definition of optimisation targets per industrial process both for through-process and unit process level optimisation have been defined which provide basis for optimisation method development in subsequent phases. Applying improved unit process models has been initiated in a form of refined process models that be will be used within applications for unit process monitoring and control in coming development phases. In each of the three demonstrators considered in the project, many individual process models and related control methods will be developed beyond their current state of the art.

For most of the key process units, mathematical models are in development or will be improved and/or updated during Morse project. Applying model-based optimisation methods to different use cases, together with data analysis, several objectives will be achieved, such as reducing quality errors, increase yield, and, at the same time, saving energy and raw materials, as well as reducing CO2 emissions. Expected results will also increase productivity and improve delivery accuracy.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.spire2030.eu/morse.