A Software Tool for Comparing the Economic Value of Different Scrap Mixes in Steel Production

The electric steel making cycle exploits steel scrap as primary raw material. Many different types of steel scrap are used, which differ in their contents of iron and other components (e.g. Zn coating, plastics, etc.). Depending on the kind of scrap, some pretreatment steps are required, which increase the actual costs of this material, but some valuable by products could also be extracted through this pre-treatment. Moreover, depending on the steel grade to be produced, some kinds of steel scraps can be more suitable as they convey also very costly micro-alloying elements which must be added in order to provide the steel with suitable properties. Therefore the real economic value of each kind of scrap is not always correctly estimated, as it depends on the steel to produce. In the paper a tool is presented, which supports an improved exploitation of the different kinds of steel scrap, in order to find the optimal scrap mix for each steel grade. This tool estimates and compares the steel total cost achieved by mixing different types of steel scrap and considering also the cost of energy and other raw materials.