RESEARCH NEWS
£ 19.5m award in drive towards Net Zero
£ 19.5m has been awarded by Innovate UK to the Materials Processing Institute in the UK and other members of the recently established Foundation Industries Sustainability Consortium ( FISC ).
This award is to run the Economic Material Innovation for Sustainable and Efficient use of Resources ( ECONOMISER ) programme that will develop a network of scale-up centres to support innovation in industry and academic engagement in carbon reduction , process improvement and product development in the Foundation Industries .
“ The Foundation Industries ( metals ; ceramics ; glass ; paper and cement ) are vital for the UK ’ s manufacturing and construction . Combined , they are worth about £ 52 billion to the UK economy , making this investment in research , development and innovation essential to enable the transition to Net Zero ,” commented the Materials Processing Institute ( MPI ).
The Foundation Industries Sustainability Consortium is a multi-industry , multi-partner group that is collaborating to deliver a more resource-efficient and sustainable use of materials flowing through the Foundation
industries and their supply chains . The current partners in the consortium are The Materials Processing Institute ; the Henry Royce Institute ; the Centre for Process Innovation and Glass Futures Ltd .
These organisations will work together to address the sustainability challenges shared across the Foundation Industries with the ECONOMISER programme supplementing the partners ’ research facilities to support the five themes below :
■ Circular economy .
■ Process optimisation .
■ Alternative fuels .
■ New material development .
■ Digital controls and sensors .
The Materials Processing Institute will lead on the New Material Development theme , developing technologies that will result in stronger and lighter materials that require fewer materials or energy inputs .
Joe Lee , ECONOMISER Project Manager for the Materials Processing Institute , commented : “ The programme will enable the Foundation Industries to access the best research , development and innovation
Chris McDonald . facilities . Scaling up research to assess its practicality is what we do and essential to ensure technologies can be commercialised to support Net Zero .” More widely , the award will support the upgrade and development of scale-up facilities and cross centre collaborations to enable increased development and accelerated deployment of sustainable technologies . These facilities will be available for the Foundation Industries and its supply chain to access , trial , prove and de-risk technologies at scale . n
Intelligent detection of stainless-steel cracks
The Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH ( AIT ) and voestalpine BÖHLER Edelstahl have developed an intelligent testing method that automatically finds defects in high-performance steel products , increasing resource efficiency in production and reducing employee workload .
Voestalpine BÖHLER Edelstahl GmbH & Co KG produces high-performance steels and nickel-based alloys for the international aerospace , automotive and oil & gas industries . An intermediate product in the production of stainless-steel products is called a “ billet ”; these have a square cross-section and are rolled for further processing . It is crucial for the quality of the end products that these rolled billets do not have any defects on their surface , such as slag inclusions or cracks . These would enlarge during rolling and impair the properties of the end products .
“ If such a defect is detected on the surface , the billet is ground further until the surface is flawless . The optimum grinding treatment and the number of grinding passes required are currently decided by employees who visually scan the surface for defects ,” explained AIT .
To do this , the researchers borrowed from the way a person inspects an object .
“ Most of the time , you can only see defects in the sub-millimetre range under a certain viewing or illumination angle . Therefore , when
The AIT test system during the inspection of a rolling billet made of steel .
a person inspects an object , they look at it from different directions ,” explained Petra Thanner , who conducts research at the AIT Centre for Vision , Automation & Control ( VAC ) and is in charge of the project at AIT .
This is mimicked by the “ Inline Computational Imaging ( ICI ) technology ” developed at AIT . Here , a camera is permanently installed above an inspection object , which moves underneath . The scene is illuminated from four different directions ; these are selected in such a way that the difference between cracks and normal grinding marks stands out as clearly as possible .
The raw camera images , on which the defects each have different shadow effects , are further processed in the next step using photometric methods . In this process , in addition to detailed and high-contrast 2D images , an exact 3D model of the surface is also calculated in which surface defects become even more clearly visible .
Artificial intelligence ( AI ) methods are used to classify these structures either as normal grinding grooves or as defects . An artificial neural network was trained with countless camera images that had previously been manually labelled as to which type of surface structure they were . The AI system learned to reliably detect unwanted defects and to colourcode them in the camera images .
The inspection system developed by AIT has now been implemented as a pilot system at voestalpine BÖHLER Edelstahl . In a compact housing that protects the sensors and electronics from the harsh environmental conditions , it inspects the surfaces of the four billet sides directly next to the grinding chamber with an accuracy of 50 micrometres at a speed of 24 metres per minute .
“ The results are clearly displayed on a screen . With the help of this assistance system , employees no longer need to leave the test stand for the time-consuming visual inspection . This not only makes work easier for the people concerned , but also enables better utilisation of the machines as it is no longer necessary to shut down the grinding system during the inspection ,” commented AIT . n
16 | ismr . net | ISMR December 2022 / January 2023