Process Design Methods Based on a Ferrosilicon Plant

MasterThe global steel market is currently suffering from price drop caused by China’s active and excessive supply of steel for common use, and further by the price rise of raw materials. A survival strategy of Korea for properly coping with such a global market situation would be to increase the production of high quality steels. Of high quality steels, particularly electrical steel is very important because China is not able to produce it easily. For the production of electrical steel, ferrosilicon is used as an additive to prepare the magnetic Si component. Ferrosilicon can be classified into high purity ferrosilicon and semi-high purity ferrosilicon according to the contents of impurities, such as Ca and Ti. In the case of high Fe-Si, domestic steel industry depends highly on import from China, and accordingly on its production in China, and therefore is facing high risks that might be caused by China’s policy changes(environmental regulation, export duties, etc.). For this reason, a domestic manufacturer established and is currently operating a plant at Ocheon-eup, Pohang-si, with an annual production goal of 35,500 tons. This research carried out a reverse engineering of the ferrosilicon plant to prepare its I/O diagram, function diagram, operation diagram and PFD, the originals of which must have been prepared at the time of designing the plant for the first time. In addition, relevant mass balance and energy balance were prepared using Aspen Plus and Excel, and research was also conducted on equipment design. Further, an effort was made to design not only a plant that adopts the process method of the established plant, but also various plants that adopt different process methods, to compare economy between them