Design Exploration of Engineered Materials, Products, and Associated Manufacturing Processes

Due to increasing competition and the demand for light-weight steel, manufacturers strive to produce new grades of steel to meet stringent sets of property specifications. The authors are informed by engineers at a major steel-making plant that for them to determine the set-points for the ladle, tundish, and caster to make a new grade of steel it takes between 20 and 25 physical plant trials. These plant trials are expensive and very difficult to schedule. In this paper, the authors focus on explicating the method for one unit operation in the steel-making process, namely, ladle refining, which is a key operation for maintaining cleanliness and controlling composition; these have a significant bearing on the steel's mechanical properties. The challenge is to determine set points for ladle refining using computational models. In this paper, the authors present a method for visualizing and exploring the solution space using the compromise Decision Support Problem (cDSP). To illustrate the efficacy of the method, the authors determine the set points of the ladle operation in an industrial setting. The focus of the paper is to elucidate the utility of method and not on the analysis models used in the framework.

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“…These results are used to construct ternary plots. The steps for constructing ternary plots are presented in ref …”

Section: Results and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Going forward, the models used here can be replaced with more accurate and complex models whereas the method remains the same. An overview of the method and representative results for determining the set points for ladle, tundish, and caster is presented in ref …”

Section: Results and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design Exploration to Determine Process Parameters of Ladle Refining for an Industrial Application

Shukla

Anapagaddi²,

Singh

et al. 2016

steel research int.

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“…Ternary plots are useful to provide an answer to this question. The details of constructing ternary plots are provided in Reference [16][17][18]. Next, we discuss how to use ternary plots (constructed using information available from exercising various scenarios) for identifying the weights to be assigned, thereby predicting the set points for ladle refining.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Design Set Points of Refining Operation in Ladle for Cost Effective Desulfurization and Inclusion Removal

Shukla

Anapagaddi

Singh

et al. 2015

Volume 2B: 41st Design Automation Conference

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This paper is motivated by a need identified by steel makers, namely, the need to produce steel products with new and often more stringent set of specifications and enhanced performances (such as fatigue life and corrosion behavior) using existing equipment cost-effectively. Manufacturing a steel product involves series of unit operations, each having a significant bearing on the properties of the end product. This paper focuses on studying the effect of one such unit operation, namely, ladle refining. The performance like corrosion behavior and fatigue life and properties of advanced high strength steel are greatly influenced by its cleanliness and by maintaining composition within specified bounds. Cleanliness of steel is assessed in terms of the count and nature of inclusions present and the levels of tramp elements such as sulfur, phosphorus and total oxygen present in the liquid steel. The desired composition is maintained with respect to alloying elements (Ni, Cr, Mn, etc.) that are added to impart certain properties to the steel. The ladle furnace is one of the key unit operations for carrying out deoxidation and desulfurization to maintain the levels of oxygen and sulfur within a tolerable limit. Deoxidation reaction during refining lead to formation of a number of which are deleterious in nature and should be removed. The effectiveness of the ladle operation is thus influenced by conflicting goals such as inclusion removal efficiency, desulfurization and the cost of refining. George Box is reputed to have observed that all models are wrong and some are useful. In keeping with George Box’s observation we suggest that our challenge is to determine the set points for the ladle unit operation using computational models that at best capture the essence of reality but not reality itself. Therefore, the need is to find solutions that are relatively insensitive to the inherent uncertainties embodied in the computational model while satisficing the conflicting goals. In this paper we present a method for visualizing and exploring the solution space using the compromise Decision Support Problem (cDSP) as a decision model. We illustrate the efficacy of our method, for use by steel producers, by determining the set points for a ladle, in an industrial setting.

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“…Here trade-off analysis means analyzing the effects of different distribution of goal priorities on the actual performance of goals, which helps designers understand about the rationality of their decisions. A ternary plot (see Kulkarni et al, 2015; Shukla et al, 2015) has been used as a trade-off analysis tool for the three-goal cDSPs. The key idea is that the sample of the weighted value sets for the goals is generated, then based on the value sets the performance (represented as normalized deviation) of each goal is calculated, and finally, the relationship between the performance and the value sets is shown using a triangle with a color-bar as shown in Figure 9.…”

Section: Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Ontology-based executable design decision template representation and reuse

Ming

Yan

Wang

et al. 2016

AIEDAM

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In decision-based design, the principal role of a designer is to make decisions. Decision support is crucial to augment this role. In this paper, we present an ontology that provides decision support from both the “construct” and the “information” perspectives that address the gap that existing research focus on these two perspectives separately and cannot provide effective decision support. The decision support construct in the ontology is the compromise decision support problem (cDSP) that is used to make multiobjective design decisions. The information for decision making is archived as cDSP templates and represented using frame-based ontology for facilitating reuse, consistency maintaining, and rapid execution. In order to facilitate designers’ effective reuse of the populated cDSP templates ontology instances, we identified three types of modification that can be made when design consideration evolves. In our earlier work, part of the utilization (consistency checking) of the ontology has been demonstrated through a thin-walled pressure vessel redesign example. In this paper, we comprehensively present the ontology utilization including consistency checking, trade-off analysis, and design space visualization based on the pressure vessel example.

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Design Exploration of Engineered Materials, Products, and Associated Manufacturing Processes

Cited by 21 publications

References 12 publications

Design Exploration to Determine Process Parameters of Ladle Refining for an Industrial Application

Design Exploration to Determine Process Parameters of Ladle Refining for an Industrial Application

Exploring the Design Set Points of Refining Operation in Ladle for Cost Effective Desulfurization and Inclusion Removal

Ontology-based executable design decision template representation and reuse

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