The General Assembly (GA) meeting of the TWINGHY project — Digital TWINs for Green HYdrogen transition in steel industry — took place in Aachen on 21 and 22 February 2024. The aim of the project is to convert the reheating furnace in the Celsa 3 steelworks to partial operation with hydrogen. The consortium from industry and science came together at the RWTH’s Institute of Mineral Engineering (GHI) to discuss the progress of the project since the last GA in September 2023.
Progress was made in all ongoing work packages. The furnace manufacturer and project partner Fives presented the development of the new, fuel-flexible burners, while gas supplier Nippon Gases presented the development of the necessary infrastructure for the supply of hydrogen. The respective activities are being coordinated by Celsa, in whose furnace the research work has to be reconciled with the day-to-day production cycle. On the IOB side, initial results from the measurement campaign at the reheating furnace in Castellbisbal and the current status of the CFD simulations of individual burners were shared with the consortium. The high-resolution benchmark for these simulations is provided by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) through large-eddy simulations. In addition, the BSC uses the available operating data to model the reheating process using neural networks. The data-driven digital twin obtained in this way is compared with a finite element process model derived from the physical principles of heat transfer by Swerim. In parallel to these developments, the influence of the fuel change on the refractory (GHI and Calderys) and on the steel billets (University of Oulu) are being investigated. The presentations were accompanied by many stimulating discussions, which continued at the evening event in Aachen’s Ratskeller.
The second day of the meeting began at the IOB, where the guests were able to gain an impression of the experimental equipment for heat treatment and burner technology during guided tours of the technical centre. Afterwards, colleagues from the GHI gave a guided tour of the laboratories with their versatile possibilities for material characterisation. After lunch, the partners met again in the GHI conference room to finalize discussions of the last work packages and formulate the next steps of the project.
We would like to thank our colleagues from GHI for the joint organisation of the meeting and look forward to the progress of the project until the next General Assembly Meeting.
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