Vallourec Soluções Tubulares do Brasil S.A.’s (VSB’s) steel mill is equipped with a highly flexible Consteel® elec-tric arc furnace (EAF) which can operate with solid and liquid charge in a wide range of mixes. Given the diversity in scrap origins and suppliers, VSB developed the Scrap Tool Online Resource Management (STORM) to ensure a more uniform metallic charge feed in density and chemical composition. The app integrates an artificial intelli-gence model for scrap classification, mixing rules for homogenization, supplier reputation and stockpile man-agement. STORM 1.0 has been used since 2020; version 2, released in 2023, aims to reduce costs by decreasing misclassifications and enhancing scrap uniformity for the EAF.

Material handling in meltshops, responsible for moving molten steel, slag or scrap, faces reliability issues due to vintage DC motor controls. Moving to AC infrastructure is sometimes prohibited. However, dual-purpose drives offer a cost-effective, reliable solution by reusing the current power infrastructure. Each motion gets a pulse width modulation drive for precise control, ensuring speed and torque regulation. The system can also handle me-chanical brakes and provide redundancy, ensuring uninterrupted operation. This upgrade also paves the way for future AC motor replacements.

Monitoring the thermal condition of slab piles after continuous casting is essential for the logistics operation of a steel plant, ensuring compliance with shipment deadlines and enabling further processing steps that require a minimum slab temperature. To achieve the necessary accuracy, cooling procedures must account for the dimen-sions of the slab pile, as cooling time is influenced by both the size and the number of stacked slabs. In this work, correlations for slab pile cooling times were developed through numerical simulations and subsequently integrat-ed into the plant’s logistics system.

High-capacity meltshop cranes exposed to harsh service environments can exhibit damages, such as cracking, during regular day-to-day operation and mostly toward end of design life. These damages can lead to equipment failure that will result in longer downtime, lost production and potential safety risks. In-depth thermal-structural assessments are a valuable tool for operators to characterize current condition and remaining life of equipment to develop a fundamental understanding of crane condition, informing future operations. This article presents the modern approaches and benefits from several structural Fitness-for-Service assessments of high-capacity meltshop cranes. The benefits from this approach are discussed considering established design-by-rule specifi-cations where calculated stresses are based on elastic analysis (i.e., AIST Technical Report No. 6) with resulting insights, life extension recommendations, and benefits to operators presented.