Environmental impact evaluation and effective management of resources in the EAF steelmaking (EIRES) : final report

The project aimed at reducing the environmental impact of EAF steelmaking by providing plant managers and technicians with a consolidated and understandable metric to quantify and monitor the overall environmental impact of the production cycle. Such ambitious objective was achieved through the following steps: built up of a data inventory for EAF steelmaking route based on historical industrial data bases collection, available on-line specific plant database and data of dedicated acquisition campaigns; definition of the metrics (Key Performance Indicator developed also by exploiting recognised techniques such as LCA) based on data inventory to asses in a quantitative manner the environmental impact of a specific electric steelmaking plant and implementation in a "metrics tool" to monitor the evolution of the metrics over time; set-up of a process modelling tool which uses the data inventory as input for an integrated modelling of the energy and mass flow of a specific EAF steelmaking plant, allowing to investigate different scenarios for potential reduction of the environmental impact of the production cycle; development of an integrated decision support tool (process modelling + metric tool) to access and track the environmental impact of the present process, to evaluate the potential effect of alterations/modifications of process parameters and of the equipment on the environmental footprint of the production cycle; assessment of the effectiveness and the reliability of the integrated decision support tool with case studies related to specific aspects at the industrial partners' sites.