Tata Steel, with an annual crude steel capacity of 35 million tonnes, is one of the world’s most geographically diversified steel producers and one of the few steel operations that are fully integrated – from mining to the manufacturing and marketing of finished products including value added automotive steel. Focussing on Innovation, Technology, Sustainability & People, Tata Steel strives to be the global steel industry benchmark for value creation and corporate citizenship. IIT Bombay is a 65 year-old premium research and educational institute in India. The institute has strong collaborative research programs with leading Indian and multinational companies, and many national and international universities resulting in the development of technologies with significant societal impact.
A real-time optimization solution for a continuous annealing furnace of Tata Steel India producing automotive grade steel has been developed using Model Predictive Control methodology and in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. This has transformed the plant operation by switching over from decades old manual control practice to automated optimal control. Systematic adoption of the solution has brought financial benefits on account of 8% reduction in fuel cost savings per ton of steel processed apart from improving the share of premium quality product by 20% through better controllability.