DASTUR presented 3 papers, including 2 invited keynote lectures, at the recently held ASIA Steel Conference in Bhubaneswar from 06-09 Feb, 2018. The papers touched on a number of challenging problems faced by DASTUR’s global steelmaker customers in recent times, and state-of-the-art yet cost-effective approaches to tackling them.

President Atanu Mukherjee inaugurated the Automation and Instrumentation session with his keynote lecture on ‘The New Economics of Steel Integrating Sensors, Simulation, Process Models and Deep Learning’. His talk on practical approaches to integrating big data analysis techniques, process models, and deep learning to create new opportunities for meaningful operating cost reduction and productivity increases, while maintaining high returns on these incremental investments.

Dr. Kinnor Chattopadhyay’s reviewed DASTUR’s approach for what-if & root-cause analyses of typical process-related problems and attainment of close control over final product quality based on transport phenomena and thermodynamics. In the plant environment, many of these experiments involve changes to the operating schedule or process which are expensive and disturb the rhythm of operations. However, these can be carried out expeditiously and at a fraction of the cost to identify the root cause of many problems.

Dr. Saikat Chatterjee presented a case study showing how significant improvement was achieved in the quality of SBQ and OCTG grade billets by utilizing a holistic approach combining process simulation, plant trials and economic assessment.

The papers were well received by the audience and may be requested from the Publications section of the DASTUR website.