Project

Project Objectives

The scope of the project is to evaluate the impact, the constraints and the benefits of the application of Industry 4.0 technologies to the burners for the steel industry.
The challenging question: “How Industry 4.0 technologies can positively transform the world of burners and combustion systems for the industrial furnaces?” will find many answers in "Burner 4.0 Concept"
Burner 4.0 concept is aimed to extend the present technological limits concerning different areas (Design, Manufacturing processes, Control and process optimization, Operating life and maintenance) to new ones through a challenging combined application of the Industry 4.0 technologies leading to a break-through burner concept for the steel industry.
The proposed methods and techniques are covering: advanced simulation for shaping optimization of critical components under thermal and creep loading, AM for new/improved and more flexible radical designs and materials in heat recuperator, to then finally control, sensing and process optimization with extraction of key KPI and KHI. Finally, a life cycle assessment completes the methodology envisaged. All techniques and methodologies follow the theme of Industry 4.0 with the aim to finally develop a digital twin using AR for dynamic interaction with real life conditions.

Burner design
Burner design will be carried out according to the best available technology design criteria, including CFD simulations for industrial burners. A completely new approach is additionally required for an integrated design of parts and sensors. Additive manufacturing processes allow the industrial production of metal parts with arbitrarily complex shapes, which cannot be obtained by traditional manufacturing operations. This represents a relevant expansion of the degrees of freedom in the engineering design of critical burner components, e.g., heat recuperator by allowing to achieve more efficient heat transfer.

Manufacturing
A modular production of critical metal components after an optimized design of functional shapes not otherwise achievable through usual manufacturing processes will be carried out by means of AM technologies. Innovative assembling techniques of AM parts will be implemented. The manufacturing process will be selected amongst the available ones considering material availability, shape restrictions, and size. The activity will be carried out in parallel to the burner design providing aid to through the defining of the design for AM criteria. The manufacturing phase will also identify the feasibility of the joint designs employing the processes singularly or in a combined form.

Control and proces optimization
In the frame of advanced combustion techniques featuring very low pollutant emissions, such as flameless and regenerative combustion, integrated sensors of different types (optical, chemical and mechanical) can provide valuable information at the level of each single burner unit, which are currently not available. These currently unobserved quantities can be exploited in existing combustion control systems by suitably correcting process parameters, i.e., air-to-fuel ratio, in order to improve combustion quality, to maximize thermal homogeneity, to minimize pollutant emissions resulting from changes in combustion regime in flameless conditions and those produced during the ignition transients in regenerative combustion systems, to adapt process parameters to instantaneous fluctuations in fuel composition in the case of multi-fuel combustion system, and also to monitor the health of relevant and critical burner components (e.g. integrated heat exchanger). By introducing a pervasive sensor network on each burner unit and post-processing the data streams by means of edge computing devices, it is believed that relevant operational cost saving (fuel consumption and maintenance) can be achieved, without sensibly increasing the burner price. Furthermore, process quality and safety improvements in steelmaking are also expected from the exploitation of more information gathered from the field. The expected improvement of the process performance must be continuously monitored, also identifying suitable KPI (Key Performance Indicators) obtained by Data Analytics algorithms, in order to make easier and more effective, also through specific HMI (Human Machine Interfaces), the possibility of taking the necessary prompt actions for maintaining process performance to the top level.

Operating life and maintenance
In the same way specific sensors of different types can provide valuable information for optimizing in real time thermal process, other sensors dedicated to a continuous monitoring of the health state of the entire burner and particularly of its critical parts, can provide fundamental information for optimizing maintenance activities also increasing the safety level of all the operations. Anticipating failures, according to their severity, always means avoiding unexpected huge costs for restructuring the plant and for the missed production. The implementation of solutions of PHM (Prognostic and Health Management) plays a growing role and the prognostic process is considered today as one of the main levers in the research of global performance. Predictive Maintenance is one of the principal methods adopted for this purpose. Health state of the burners can be continuously monitored also by identifying KHI (Key Health Indicators) obtained by Data Analytics algorithms in order to simplify the interaction of the operators with the plant. Operating life of burners early begins during commissioning on the furnace. A faster commissioning of the combustion system could be envisaged for example through the support of Industry 4.0 technologies like Augmented Reality which can lead also to a higher safety level during the operations.