Chinese Academy of Engineering academician Wang Guodong's New Year's message: Innovation drives development, technology leads the future

　　Building on past successes and forging ahead into the future. The year 2018 was the best year for China's steel industry in the past 10 years, with steady improvements in operational quality and efficiency. 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, and is a crucial year for deepening supply-side structural reforms, accelerating the construction of a strong manufacturing nation, and promoting high-quality development. As a key industry supporting China's high-quality development, the steel industry must also deepen supply-side structural reforms, strategically shifting towards green, intelligent, and high-quality development, achieving innovation-driven development, and leading the future with technology.

 

 

　　Green development is the only way for the steel industry to move forward. To achieve green development, full-process control is necessary, focusing on breakthroughs in the following areas: Firstly, material design; strengthening innovation in key common process technologies to ensure that material and product development truly achieves "reduction, low cost, and high performance"; secondly, source control; implementing a refined material policy, relying on innovative ore selection technology to advance the main window for improving raw material cleanliness, improving pig iron quality, and reducing subsequent costs; thirdly, production processes; innovating in each process, replacing them with green production methods to achieve full-process green production in the steel industry. For example: conducting research on low-carbon ironmaking in blast furnaces and non-blast furnace ironmaking technologies, focusing on scrap steel utilization and electric arc furnace steelmaking research, paying attention to the development of defect-free billet continuous casting technology and high-speed continuous casting technology, continuous casting billet direct rolling and fully continuous head-less rolling technology, applying and developing acid-free hot-dip galvanizing technology, and rapid heat treatment and hot-dip galvanizing technology for cold-rolled strip steel, etc.

 

 

　　The steel industry has the strongest demand for intelligence, but overall, a fully integrated intelligent control and coordination optimization system has not yet been formed. The steel industry is a process industry, and the core task of intelligent manufacturing is to establish a sufficiently accurate virtual mapping of the CPS (Cyber-Physical System). However, the main production processes such as blast furnaces, converters, refining furnaces, ladles, continuous casting billets, hot-rolled products, and cold-rolled products are all "black boxes", and the production status and parameters cannot be measured online in real time. The currently used mechanism or physical model prediction accuracy is limited, and it is difficult to further improve it through traditional methods. To solve this problem, we must resort to technological innovation. The introduction of the new concept of "digital sensing" provides us with a new approach and feasible method for using big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to overcome previously insurmountable obstacles. It can provide an ideal solution for precise sensing and control in "black box" industries such as metallurgy, thereby achieving precise coordinated control of intelligent systems and equipment and further intelligent optimization choices.

 

 

　　The high-quality transformation of steel products requires innovation, based on in-depth research into the relationship between the "composition, process, structure, and performance" tetrahedron of materials, using "reduction, low cost, and high performance" as the new concept for material research and development, focusing on the following aspects: Firstly, upgrading and replacing traditional materials, reducing alloy content, adopting advanced process technologies, reducing resource and energy consumption, and moving conventional products towards the mid-to-high end to create "the first"; secondly, innovatively developing high-tech materials, achieving large-scale production, playing a leading role, and creating "the only"; thirdly, conquering key high-end materials to meet the needs of major projects such as national defense and military industry; fourthly, focusing on expanding composite materials, expanding the application of steel materials in the field of composite materials, and improving material utilization efficiency. At the same time, for high-quality products, high-quality production processes and supporting production equipment should be developed to achieve full-process optimization of smelting, refining, continuous casting and rolling, and heat treatment, and to achieve mass production and industrial application of high-quality products.

 

 

　　Improving service quality and level and building a service-oriented steel industry is our goal. We must be driven by market and user needs, grasp the essence, actively innovate, and provide users with full-process technical services and overall solutions, including material selection, product manufacturing, equipment debugging, and mass production applications. The Baosteel automotive steel EVI cooperation model and the industrialization of 2GPa hot stamping steel developed by Northeastern University in BenGang are worth learning from.

　　As China's economic development enters a new era, the path to high-quality development of the steel industry is long and arduous. Relying on innovation and focusing on the development of new technologies, new processes, new equipment, and new products in green, intelligent, high-quality, and service-oriented areas is the only way for us to build a strong steel industry. We hope that the World Metal Bulletin will strengthen its reporting on innovative technologies in 2019, play a leading role in the public opinion in the field of steel industry technology, and contribute to the high-quality development of the steel industry.