Steel slag is a by-product of steel making that is produced during the separation of the molten steel from impurities in steel-making furnaces. The steel slag occurs as a molten liquid melt and is a complex solution of silicates and oxides that solidifies upon cooling.

The processing of steel slag for metals recovery is important to remove excess steel at the market source for reuse at the steel plant and also to facilitate the use of the nonmetallic steel slag as construction aggregate. The unknown variable and ultimate question to be answered was when the slag was transferred to a pot for plant removal, how much actual steel was mixed in with the slag?

GW designed and implemented a state of the art Slag Pot Management System to answer that question. The complexity of the system primarily involved determining an accurate total volume for the material in the slag pots while working within the constraints of a steel mill environment.

Due to the different physical properties of slag and steel, accurately computing the total volume of material in the slag pot in conjunction with the total weight of the pot would allow us to compute the percentage of steel in the pot. Multiple laser scanners and a digital camera were incorporated into the hardware portion of the system and were integrated with specially developed system software that allowed us to achieve productivity optimization and accomplish the following tasks:

1.Identify the slag pot.

2.Measure the height of the slag in the pot.

3.Measure the height of the rim of the slag pot.

4.Interface to the scale to receive the weight and carrier.

5.Store the tare weight of each pot for each trip.

6.Compute the percent steel in a full pot.

7.Interface with the steel mill communication systems to provide per load statistics.

8.Provide historical reporting and data management services.