METALLURGICAL SIMULATION OF THE EAF-PROCESS

The electric arc furnace (EAF) is the starting point in most stainless-steel and in many carbon-steel melt shops. Usually the automation environment consists besides the basic automation system (Level 1) of a real time collection of process related data and some static calculations for the required process-inputs like energy, oxygen, alloys, etc. Siemens VAI developed a dynamic Cyclic Calculation which allows the online-description of the system of steel, slag and scrap during the complete treatment at the EAF. This includes heating and melting of scrap, temperature losses and chemical reactions. The same routines are used for a full cyclic Precalculation of the process before the heat is started, in order to optimize the treatment at the EAF. A Charge Calculation to determine the loading of the scrap-buckets is implemented using a simplex-algorithm.The comprehensive group of Siemens VAI process models is referred to as SteelExpert. This process optimization system (Level 2) has been applied successfully to a wide range of treatment practices like using scrap buckets only, scrap buckets and liquids combined, and also liquid only.