SMS Group
Assembly Line
🇩🇪 How Germany’s steelmakers plan to go green
Global steel production today accounts for at least 7 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In Germany, it emits more than a quarter of the country’s total industrial carbon dioxide. Salzgitter has said that once its revamped steel plant is run entirely on green hydrogen, its annual CO2 emissions, which currently stand at 8mn tonnes, will drop by a staggering 95 per cent.
German authorities have pledged more than €6bn in subsidies to steelmakers in a bid to shore up Europe’s largest industrial base, which is already struggling with high energy prices and falling global demand for its cars and machinery. The full implementation of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, a tariff regime intended to give Europe’s basic industries protection from cheaper, dirtier imports while they decarbonise their own operations, has opened a window of opportunity for such heavy investment.
Quality Execution System® – two use cases in the European metals industries
Data from various automation levels is consolidated to represent each coil, bridging the gap between the physical and digital realms. This requires data to be transmitted flawlessly, enabling the virtual coil to mirror the physical coil. As the coil progresses through the production route, a digital counterpart is created at each stage of the process. The Quality Execution System (QES®) is designed to gather, combine, and examine all the data pertaining to a coil, thereby establishing the foundation for its digital twin.
Speira, a leading European aluminum rolling and recycling company, is expanding the QES® application ‘Automatic Coil Grading & Release and Genealogy’ to two of its strip coating line routes as part of a long-term digitalization initiative it launched earlier. Speira’s aluminum rolling mill in Grevenbroich, Germany stands for high-quality automotive, beverage can, foil and lithographic products.
TATA Steel, the second largest European steel manufacturer, is also expanding cooperation with SMS as part of a long-term and early-started digitalization initiative. TATA started with their automated coil release at the cold mill in 2012. One of the main goals was to improve the utilization of surface inspection data and conduct post-processing. TATA invested in the automatic coil release for the DSP (direct sheet plant) and Hot Mill shortly after. The Cold Mill now started implementing the PDW part of the DataFactory. Wouter Overgaauw, Manager Quality Assurance Cold Rolling Mill Ijmuiden, states: “The amount of measurement data is steadily increasing, the possibilities for data-driven applications are improving, the PDW gives us the possibility to make better use of both data and applications.”