Real-time online analytics for Shredded Scrap

The use of shredded scrap in the steel making process has significant metallurgical advantages including shorter tap-to-tap times, faster filling of scrap baskets or melting furnace as well as reduced electrode costs.

Despite the advantages, the use of shredded scrap remains limited in many steel plants. Main culprit is the increasing quality problem characterized by continuously rising copper contents within the shredded scrap. The unpredictable copper content fluctuations limit the use of shredded scrap especially in steel production of high quality steel grades that only allows for a very low copper content. To balance out the copper content steel producers opt for higher pig iron, DRI or HBI levels. Generally, an increase in raw iron results in higher steel production cost as well as a poor CO₂ performance, however, stable production levels make this a widely accepted practice in the industry.

SICON has elaborated a two-step solution to make shredded scrap use in steel production worthwhile. The EcoScan Online is a reliable and a profitable online-based analyzer for continuous and complete transparency of shredded scrap chemical parameters as well as its bulk weight. Knowing what your input material consists off allows for an optimum input amount of shredded scrap to be used in the steel making process. Complete transparence of shredded scrap makes worst-case-scenarios a thing of the past.

Combined with SICON’s ScrapTuning solution, the EcoScan Online unfolds its full potential of improving steel production. ScrapTuning is another of SICON’s tailored solutions for the steel industry and provides with a crucial step of cleaning shredded scrap from impurities detected by the EcoScan. The combination of these two steps allows steel producers to not only monitor their input material but also to pre-treat it to meet quality-criteria such as guaranteed copper contents below 0.15 and 0.2%.

Having introduced the concepts of the EcoScan and ScrapTuning, the availability of feasible input material for steel plants has now been amplified. ScrapTuning allows to source cheaper lower-quality shredded scrap which can then be pre-treated to meet the steel plants’ specific quality requirements for input material composition. The possibility of pre-treating material makes shredded scrap attractive for the long steel production as an alternative to pig iron, DRI and HBI.

Both solutions, the EcoScan Online as well as ScrapTuning, are online-based solutions that can be easily included in an existing plant network and come completely automated.

To sum it up, both systems, individually and even more so combined, have the potential to transform shredded scrap use in the steel production making it a highly-transparent and optimizable input material.