USING DATA-DRIVEN ANALYTICS TO DEVELOP A MATERIAL BALANCE OVER A FERROCHROME FURNACE

Furnaces used for ferrochrome production are complex systems. There are a significant number of inlet and outlet streams with various parameters. However, some of these parameters are not always measured, which can limit decision-making abilities. Linking available data and additional information together with data analytics can possibly produce estimates of the unknown streams. It is, therefore, necessary to perform a material balance on a typical ferrochrome furnace to evaluate the underlying fundamentals of this concept. This paper provides a brief overview of the furnace parameters measured in practice, before presenting an approach to perform the material balance. The available measurements of input and output streams are used together with literature-based compositions. This analytical approach links the known composition together with the known mass to estimate the unknown streams. The analytics are structured in such a way that it can later be automated. The approach is applied to several industrial case studies and the results are presented in order to provide a proof of concept. The analysis manages to balance all elements (in and out) within an accuracy margin of 1.25%. The results are further discussed to illustrate the potential benefit in various application areas.

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