Energy-intensive industries, embedded in many strategic value chains, make up more than half of the energy consumption of the European industry and reducing their CO2 intensity is crucial for meeting the objectives of the Paris agreement. Within EIIs, metallurgy poses a major challenge due to the trade-off that must be found between maintaining economic profitability, while progressively implementing the required transformations for a greener production. While digitalisation is generating a data deluge, Artificial Intelligence cannot be fully adopted due to limitations to share data between several factories and the heterogeneity of systems that hinders the replicability of AI. ALCHIMIA aims to build a platform based on Federated Learning and Continual Learning to help big European metallurgy industries unlock the full potential of AI to support the needed transformations to create high-quality, competitive, efficient and green manufacturing processes. The project will address the challenges of the steel sector, creating an innovative system that automates and optimises the production process dynamically with a holistic approach that includes scrap recycling and steelmaking. ALCHIMIA will find an optimal mix to reduce energy consumption, emissions and waste generation of steelmaking while guaranteeing to obtain high-quality products. The replicability and scalability of ALCHIMIA will be enabled through a complementary use case for the manufacturing of automotive parts. The developed system will be used for prognostic optimisation of the mix of input materials charged in the furnaces to obtain a certain product quality that matches the customers' specifications while reducing the environmental impact and the energy consumption. ALCHIMIA will not only seek the optimal mix for the charge of metallurgy furnace, it will also determine the best combination of learning capacities to enable a smooth green transition for all industries thanks to unprecedented collaboration

EAF steelmaking is the key technology for decarbonised steelmaking, either in scrap-based plant by modification of existing processes for further decarbonisation, or as new EAF installations in decarbonised integrated steel works to (partly) replace the classical BF-BOF production. At same time the EAF is the most important example for modular and hybrid heating, already now combining electric arc heating with burner technologies. Consequently, it was selected as main focus of GreenHeatEAF for the Call „Modular and hybrid heating technologies in steel production“. GreenHeatEAF develops and demonstrates the most important decarbonisation approaches at EAFs including the use of hydrogen to replace natural gas combustion in existing or re-vamped burners or innovative technologies like CoJet. Furthermore, decarbonisation of EAF steelmaking by solid materials like DRI/HBI and renewable carbon sources like biochar is tackled. Technologies to re-optimise the heating management with maximum heat recovery of off-gas and slag employing new sensor and soft-sensor concepts as well as extended digital twins are developed: as result the extended CFD and flowsheeting models, and monitoring and control tools will prognose the influences of the different decarbonisation measures on EAF and process chain to support upcoming decarbonisation investments and to enable the control of decarbonised hybrid heating with maximum energy efficiency. GreenHeatEAF combines trials in demonstration scale, e.g. in combustion- and EAF-demo plants, with validations in industrial scale and digital optimisations with high synergy. Thus, it completely follows the Horizon Twin Transition and Clean Steel Partnership objectives and the target to progress decarbonisation technologies from TRL 5 to 7. This synergic concept of GreenHeatEAF supports implementation and digitisation to speed up the transition of the European steel industry to highly competitive energy-efficient decarbonised steel productio

SteamDry develops and pilots superheated steam drying technology (SSD) for weblike materials such as paper, board, tissue, and nonwovens. SSD is expected to reduce the consumption of energy radically, leading to 60% energy savings in a drying process, representing ~40% energy savings on the entire production line. It also demonstrates a concept that can lead to CO2 emission-free paper and board manufacturing, and an increase in the share of renewable energy. In a long term, the energy savings potential in Europe is 127 TWh or 6 B€ annually for paper and board manufacturers. In addition to pulp and paper sectors, the developed concepts are expected to be suitable for chemical industry and wood processing applications. Through the developed SteamDry concept, the technology suppliers can increase their market share revenue 230-345 M€ annually in Europe. The global annual energy savings potential is 870 TWh, almost 7x of European energy savings and market potential. The developed solution can be installed on either existing infrastructure or on newbuilt machines with low CAPEX and OPEX creating new opportunities for technology suppliers and savings for the users of this technology. Results ultimately lead to the prosperity of these companies and the CO2-savings targets of the EU. Exploitation potential will be validated through the business cases calculated by technology suppliers and product manufacturers. The piloting of SSD increases knowledge of a) keeping two gas phases, air and steam, separate, b) cleaning superheated steam from biobased particles, c) operating these safely and d) AI-supported advanced control platform. This approach builds on the consortium with strong capabilities to perform the action. The consortium consists of four R&D institutes and two universities - with piloting, technology upscaling, AI, and modeling expertise - two leading technology suppliers and five product manufacturers that are potential end users for the developed technology.

The aim of E-ECO Downstream is to enable a clean steel production by developing advanced and breakthrough technologies for the steel making downstream processes. This will decisively support the EU in achieving its goal towards climate neutrality by 2050. E-ECO Downstream focuses on the efficient utilization of hydrogen, biogas, and electricity to substitute carbon-based fuels and drastically lower the carbon footprint of the steel production. Energy efficiency is pursued to enable sustainable utilization of volatile green energy. Currently installed burners of reheating furnaces will be enabled to utilize green H2 by integration of newly designed and 3D-printed burner components instead of replacing entire burner systems. To increase fuel flexibility hybrid heating concepts (H2 and electricity) will be investigated in a pilot walking beam furnace. Since the mentioned solutions will change the waste heat streams and their heat recovery in future downstream processes must be reevaluated. This will be done by analysing the partners processes and plants, development and testing of waste heat recovery concepts and recuperators regarding their suitability to new fuels and their off gases, while considering their impact on materials/product. Energy efficiency potentials of downstream processes will be evaluated by case studies for the application of hot charge from casting to hot rolling by covering of the slabs with passive and active panels. The elaborated solutions will be assessed by techno-eco-environmental analysis to evaluate their applicability and to increase their acceptance in the steel community. The E-ECO Downstream consortium has a deep and shared knowledge of iron and steel making, downstream processes and heating technology, materials engineering, numerical simulation, experimental investigations, economy, and life cycle analysis.