Towards the future of steelmaking burners with new on-line OES process control

For the steel industry to achieve the ambitious goals of greener steelmaking by 2050, the steelmaking chain from raw material to the end product has to be considered as a whole. Electricity-based steelmaking using hydrogen as reducing gas in electric arc furnaces has been identified to have a key role to reach the targets of lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Project information

Project duration

-

Funded by

Research Council of Finland - Postdoctoral Researcher

Funding amount

226 940 EUR

Project coordinator

University of Oulu

Unit and faculty

Process Metallurgy
Faculty of Technology

Contact information

Contact person

Project description

In addition to electricity, additional energy is provided by burning e.g. oxy-fuels and natural gas in order to increase the melting rate of the charge material or reheating steel bloom for final production. The objective of this project is to develop an on-line process control tool for steelmaking burners with optical emissions spectroscopy (OES) coupled with a heat transfer model. In this way, the species that radiate in the flame, including impurities, can be identified together with addressing the flame's radiative heat transfer properties. For the steel industry to decrease the carbon dioxide emissions, the burner gases will have to gradually change towards e.g. hydrogen or bio-fuels eventually. The majority of the burners in the steel industry use natural gas and its mixtures as burning gas, and thus on-line in situ process control tool for burners would allow increasing the efficiency of the burners and optimizing the flame's properties. In addition to natural gas burners, gases with elevated hydrogen content will be studied in this project so that the effect of gradual change towards hydrogen applications can be realized.