Visualization and simulation of steel metallurgy processes

Steel production involves the transfer and transformation of material and energy at different levels, structures, and scales, and this process incurs substantial information in the material and energy dimensions. Given the black-box feature of iron and steel production processes, process visualization plays an important role and inevitably benefits parameter correction, technical support decision-making, personnel training, and other aspects of the steel metallurgy industry. The technological characteristics of the entire process in the steel industry were analyzed in this study, a visualization technology route based on virtual reality (VR) was built, and the important components of visual simulation system for steel industry and the important technical points needed to realize the system were proposed. On the foundation, a visual simulation model for the process scheduling of the iron and steel enterprise raw materials’ field, slab, and hot rolling processes was built, and a visualization simulation platform of the iron and steel metallurgy plant-wide process, including ironmaking, steelmaking, hot rolling, and cold rolling, was developed. Lastly, the effectiveness of platform was illustrated by practical application.