Located in Guangxi Province, China, the Liuzhou Iron and Steel Company is one of China’s leading suppliers of plate steel to its shipbuilding industry. Also exporting to countries such as Japan, Germany, Singapore and Thailand, the company is now capable of producing one million tons of steel per year, owing to a series of recent technical innovation projects. Foremost among these is an ongoing...

In this paper a data mining approach for variable selection and knowledge extraction from datasets is presented. The approach is based on unguided symbolic regression (every variable present in the dataset is treated as the target variable in multiple regression runs) and a novel variable relevance metric for genetic programming. The relevance of each input variable is calculated and a model ap...

The lichen transplant monitoring methodology has been tested for source apportionment of metal deposition around the Cu smelter and former mining town of Karabash. Transplants of the lichen Hypogymnia physodes (L.) Nyl., collected from a 'control' site in July 2001, were set up at 10 stations along a 60 km NE-SW transect centred on Karabash. Samples were collected after 2 and 3 month monitoring...

In connection with future utilization of magnetite titanium ores deposited in Poland in the region of Suwałki the test were performed to get information regarding the influence of titan and vanadium admixtures on the quality of pig iron and the run of blast furnace process. As a blast furnace charge, there were used magnetite titanium concentrates similar to the ores deposited in the Suwałki re...

Since its invention until the 1950s, the iron blast furnace was viewed as a strange ‘black box’. Its operation was largely empirical and much of the information needed for monitoring and control of the process was yet to be known. More complete information was needed concerning the process such as the reduction of iron-bearing raw materials, the distribution of materials throughout the stack, t...

An important problem at an integrated steel producing plant is the blending of different types of coals to make coke for the blast furnace operation. Historically linear blending models were not appropriate because coal properties important for both optimum cokemaking and blast furnace operation do not combine linearly and are not completely understood. In this talk, a two-step methodology is d...

Several numerical approaches have been proposed in the literature to simulate the behavior of modern blast furnaces: finite volume methods, data-mining models, heat and mass balance models, and classical thermodynamic simulations. Despite this, there is actually no efficient method for evaluating quickly optimal operating parameters of a blast furnace as a function of the iron ore composition, ...