Advances in steel production technology have been dictated in part by the consumer and producer, given the need to minimize costs and to ensure their competitiveness in the market.
The steel industry has also been evolving in recent years under the focus of intensive and rational use of energy, not only during reductive smelting, but also in the charge preparation and refining processes in the steelworks, aiming at optimizing in terms of quality and operating costs.
The majority of Brazilian and global steel production uses BOF (Basic Oxigen Furnace) steelworks with the LD process (Linz and Donawitz). This is due to the characteristics of high productivity, adequate costs and great metallurgical versatility in the manufacture of new types of steel, conferred by the LD process.
For this reason, SoftSider S/A has developed a primary refining simulator to speed up and facilitate the analysis of a run process in steel mills that use LD type converters. The main objective of this tool is to optimize the converter load, so that the restrictions for this load are known, providing the results of the calculations of the reactor mass and heat balance, showing a technical analysis of the main indicators of this process, in addition to providing the financial results of the run.
