The proceeding for “Stålforskningsdagarna” has finally arrived from print. It has two parts, where the first provides an overview of educational programmes and research facilities in materials science at Dalarna University. The second part consists of papers authored by the speakers at the conference next week. “Stålforskningsdagar 2011 — Materialteknik vid Högskolan Dalarna”, Joakim Storck (editor). […]
I’m responsible for arranging “Stålforskningsdagarna 2011″ (“Steel research days”), a two-day research conference arranged on Mars 30–31 in Borlänge by the department of materials science at Dalarna University. The conference is a regional research symposium where all speakers, in some way, are linked to our department. We are publishing the conference proceedings in the form of […]
Today was a big day at the new metal forming laboratory at Dalarna University (previously mentioned in this post): After several years of talking and planning, our new cold rolling mill finally works. And I’ve spent the day playing with it to learn how it works. I and a few om my colleagues at the university […]
What are the general characteristics that set the steel industry apart from conventional manufacturing industry? And, depending on the answer, how do the processes of product development and production engineering differ from other manufacturing industries? One difference is that steel producers are faced with a divergent production flow where a few constituent materials are combined […]
I’ve written about how process flexibility and small batch sizes improve production flow in steel industries in a couple of earlier posts (here and here). In this post I’ll discuss how the economical consequences of flexible rolling mill technology can be studied using a conceptual process cost model. The figure below illustrates a conceptual cost model […]
This post is an edited excerpt from my thesis “Strategic and operational capabilities in steel production”. You can download a full PDF here. Capabilities that follow from flexibility on the machine level become more important when a steel plant is producing a wide product range and production volumes are low for each variant. Setup costs […]
Why is it that so few steel plants practice hot charging, i.e. why is the material allowed to cool down after casting only to be reheated again in the next processing step? Continuous casting is today the most frequently used method for production of steel workpieces. The continuous casting process was developed with high efficiency in […]
This post is a slight rewrite of the abstract for a presentation that I’m preparing for a mini–conference next week. Most niche market steel producers, like for example all major Swedish steel companies, would likely be able to make substantial productivity improvements with processing technology that permit cost efficient low volume production in the presence of […]
A couple of years ago I wrote a conference paper where I discussed the potential to reduce energy consumption in steel plants with lean produciton methods. The idea was that the philosophy expressed in Toyota’s TPS House, which reads “shortening the production flow by eliminating waste”, shows a way to implement so called hot charging […]
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