Hong Dai, head of Metals Mining Business Dept. for CISDI’s Consulting Business Division

How five-flow systematic solutions enhance plant-wide competitiveness

Augmented Reality enabled me to take METEC visitors on a dynamic visual journey around Baowu Zhanjiang Steel.

Over 100 people marvelled at the experience and learned how CISDI had improved the steelworks’ competitiveness by studying the plant’s five flows - iron flow, mass flow, energy flow, information flow and emission flow - and designing a steelworks master plan around them which would be more competitive, economical and better for the environment.

I used AR to take visitors on a ‘tour’ of the plant’s general layout and through a dynamic simulation of the five flows and how they had been used.

During my AR demonstrations I received numerous interesting questions and comments.

A visitor from South Korea commented: “How amazing! Can I try it? What are your core technologies?” and a visitor from Japan wanted to know the maximum water recycle ratio and the designed iron utilisation ratio. 

An intrigued steelworks representative from India revealed its plant had never attempted to recover blast furnace gas and wanted to know how the company could benefit from gas recovery.

A visitor from Africa was particularly impressed and enquired how CISDI’s technology could assist with the problem of low-quality ore grade at the location of their steelworks, and reduce production costs by using the five-flow concept.

A representative from a European steelworks wanted to know if analysis of emission flow could guarantee a reduction in emissions which would meet the environmental requirement.

More and more clients now appreciate the significance an optimised general layout design, or master plan plays when creating better values for steel.

In our opinion, pursuing cost competitiveness is crucial to the future of steel and CISDI’s general layout design places it as top priority, from front-end planning to downstream designs.

We use a multi-dimensional analysis method to evaluate the systematic investment and propose an optimised design which will control the entire investment cost.

In addition, we study the plant-wide comprehensive cost, individual plant continuous cost and the influence important factors can have on costs.

We find out the variations in manufacturing costs per tonne of steel and the reasons for those variations. Based on those results, we then propose an optimised general layout which would enable the steelworks to run at its most cost-competitive production levels.

Green and intelligent manufacturing are other major commitments for the steel industry and given great emphasis in our general layout designs.

CISDI is conducting a feasibility study report and plant upgrades for LPS Greenfield 10Mt/a steelworks, the largest steel complex to be built in Australia

A CISDI’s representative operates the AR for the 5-flow expertise for Baowu Zhanjiang Steel